However, the flip-side is that there are some issues that ACE seems not to care about — like free expression. ACE now warns funded organisations that it will “monitor… artistic and creative output that might be deemed controversial” and requires them to consider “the views and perceptions of different stakeholders, including their appetite for risk”. On the next page of the guidance, there’s the threat of sanctions — from “increased monitoring” to “withdrawal of funding”. This is an object lesson in how to have a chilling effect on culture in Britain. The announcement by Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer this month of a full-scale independent review into the organisation is welcome; the Arts Council’s role in limiting artistic freedom must be examined.

The review could highlight the poor treatment of dozens of artists. In 2022, for instance, the gender-critical ceramicist Claudia Clare was invited to exhibit at ACE-funded Burgh House, Hampstead — only for her exhibition to later be cancelled. The director of Burgh House, Mark Francis, emailed Clare to explain: “We respect the rights of individuals to hold their own beliefs, but once these have been made public by an individual, we must consider all stakeholders in the charity and their rights to feel included and safe.” This is ACE’s approach to free expression in action.

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While freelancers who work in the arts are often unwilling to go on the record about their experiences, for fear of losing work, Clare is far from alone. A number of programming staff at a major ACE-funded organisation recently described to me how they were investigated by its HR department after inviting a gender-critical artist to speak. Their jobs are now in doubt because they “exposed audiences to dangerous ideas”. Similarly, a dance company’s tour was cancelled in 2023 after several venues realised the production contained gender-critical feminist content. The people concerned don’t want to risk further damage to their careers by being quoted here.

The same hostility can be traced back to the Arts Council itself. In June last year, Denise Fahmy, an ACE employee of more than 15 years, won a harassment claim against the body. (She has co-founded Freedom in the Arts with choreographer Rosie Kay.) Her case related to another labyrinthine arm of bureaucracy, the London Community Fund, which had awarded an ACE grant — later suspended — to the gender-critical group LGB Alliance. After an internal meeting in which Fahmy was the only person to challenge the view that the LGB Alliance is anti-trans, colleagues circulated a petition which condemned “discriminatory transphobic staff” and claimed the LGB Alliance had links to “neo-Nazis, homophobes and Islamaphobes [sic]”. When she won the case, Fahmy said: “People in the arts, and especially women, are facing a tide of bullying with spurious accusations of transphobia… I hope my case has woken up leaders in the arts as to what’s going on.”

It’s certainly a shift from ACE’s early vision. When I first started working in the subsidised arts in 1996, ACE modestly described itself as “the key funding body for the arts”. And this was in keeping with its founding principles, dreamed up in the post-war moment of cultural democratisation. Growing out of the wartime Committee for Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), the Arts Council was established by Royal Charter in 1946 to “develop and improve knowledge, understanding and practice of the arts”, and to spread them as widely as possible throughout the country. John Maynard Keynes chaired both CEMA and the new body, and his vision of great art for everyone remained unchallenged for 60 years.

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By the mid-2000s, though, something had changed. ACE had by then become “the national development agency for the arts”, and this heralded an attitudinal shift. Rather than a mere funding body, it began to see itself as the sponsor and patron of the sort of arts it wanted to see. Over time, aspirations towards artistic influence in turn morphed into activism. Last year, the body rechristened itself “the national development agency for creativity and culture”, and announced its new agenda in a 10-year plan, “Let’s Create”, which retreats further than ever from Keynes’s original principles.

Rather than its historical day-job — increasing access to dance, literature, music, theatre, and the rest — ACE now subordinates “the arts” within a grand, utopian social idea of universal creativity: “We aim to recognise and champion the creative activities and cultural experiences of every person in every town, village and city in this country.” And who could be against that? Unlike the more divisive “art”, creativity is a nice, unthreatening word. Some people aren’t into art, but being against “creativity” is like being against puppies.

Yet this dilution of ACE’s original commitment has been accompanied by the politicisation of its internal culture. The Nolan Principles (established in 1994 as an ethical code for public life) require ACE to be objective and “take decisions impartially, fairly and on merit, using the best evidence and without discrimination or bias”. But ACE’s impartiality is clearly under severe pressure from many of its own staff. Last year, for instance, ACE’s own independent Equality, Diversity and Inclusion review warned that some Arts Council staff’s perception of themselves as members of the artistic profession, rather than employees of a governmental body, was leading to a widespread failure to understand their responsibilities.

Denise Fahmy saw this first-hand in her time at the body. “The Arts Council struggles with being a mere funder,” she said, “they see their jobs as much bigger than this”. She explains how the Arts Council developed a new environmental responsibility policy, initially requiring funded organisations to supply straightforward data on fuel use to contribute to the Net Zero government policy. This was then developed into a new “investment principle”. Applicants for funding are now required to consider “how creation, programming and partnerships can help support your commitment and provoke debate”. Fahmy says: “If you’re wondering why there are so many shows about climate change, check organisations’ funding requirements. Arts organisations increasingly see themselves as activists, and the Arts Council is driving this through its funding criteria.”

I contacted ACE to ask where I might find an Arts Council policy on free expression. I spoke to a helpful ACE staffer, but he couldn’t find anything. He promised to consult colleagues “to see if anyone has any info tucked away”. In fact, it turns out that there are just two sentences about free expression in the guidance for organisations: “For the avoidance of doubt, we expect all NPOs to support freedom of expression. We see this as essential for a thriving cultural sector in this country.”

The consequences of such half-hearted support aren’t hard to glean. As the need for a government review attests, the original organisation is being pulled apart by the competing demands of political fashion, a levelling attitude to art itself, and the increasing dominance of activist staff. Ultimately, ACE isn’t just ignoring the developing crisis in artistic free expression — it appears to be actively fostering an intolerant culture. “Do not think of the Arts Council as a schoolmaster,” wrote Keynes in 1945, “the arts owe no vow of obedience” — by which he meant obedience to government. What he didn’t anticipate was that, nearly 80 years later, the Arts Council has become the schoolmaster and the disciplinarian, dishing out orthodoxies from on high.

“So you think I may be delusional, or psychotic, for thinking it’s sex addiction?” She doesn’t seem to be trying to pressure me, she really wants to know. “I don’t think you’re delusional at all,” I reply. “I think you’re trying to understand yourself.”

Abby has good grades, some friends, an ex she still talks to, a few hobbies. She is nervous about her career (should she go to grad school?) and sometimes she feels sad or anxious for no reason. She is also fixated on the idea that she has a severe mental illness, possibly any severe mental illness. Having sat with her for many sessions, I am pretty sure she does not. But I also try, bearing clinical ethics in mind, to take her concerns seriously.

Abby is typical. Many young people I work with try to understand themselves (and often others) through the lens of mental illness. Typically they are focused on one diagnosis, but some, like Abby, are open to having several, many, or any. My co-workers notice it too. One colleague recently brought a question to our clinic’s staff meeting: “Has anyone else noticed a large number of students lately claiming to be on the autism spectrum, despite seeming to be… clearly not autistic based on clinical criteria?” Heads nodded. Why is it that so many young people are concerned that they are sick? And what is a mental health professional to do, in a culture where patients come in having already staked out their symptoms?

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Several of my colleagues, in that meeting, suggested that teens had learned about the diagnosis they had adopted on social media. I was reminded of writer PE Moskowitz’s lamentation, last year, that mental health has become “Buzzfeed-ified”, resulting in a world where being ADHD versus being Bipolar is like being a Hufflepuff versus a Slytherin, or an Aquarius versus a Gemini. I’m not entirely convinced, though. People hear about all kinds of things on social media. To identify with what you hear requires particular conditions: you have to be searching for a convincing story to tell about yourself.

This story is about more than TikTok. The world of diagnosis is experiencing a crisis of confidence. The tools we use are somewhat reliable — we can throw the dart 20 times and hit the same spot, or 20 clinicians can meet the same person and identify that they may be “clinically depressed”. The question now is whether our tools are valid: is the bullseye actually where we think it is? If I’m debating with a college student about whether or not they have Major Depressive Disorder, I have to confront the fact that depression is not just one thing. My university students show me, over and over, that diagnoses of mental illness aren’t like medical diseases, which one either has or one doesn’t. A cluster of depressive symptoms will, in different people, have very different roots — some contextual, some biological, some behavioural. I may agree with other therapists that the patient meets the criteria for a given diagnosis, but we won’t necessarily be able to agree on what it means to have that diagnosis: where has it come from, how long will it last, what shall we do about it?

Part of the challenge lies in this very postmodern acceptance that there is no singular truth. But we do tend to end up using categories, and the ones we have currently are atavistic, more connected to the early pioneers of psychiatry than to up-to-date neuroscience. The still-common diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, for instance, was constructed based on a supposed borderline between the neurotic and psychotic, which is now commonly understood as obsolete. There are myriad categories for psychotic disorders: schizophrenia, schizophreniform disorder, schizoaffective disorder, brief psychotic disorder, schizotypal personality disorder — to name just a few. Many date back to the 19th century, some are redundant, several are tough to differentiate. Some have also become politicised: during the US Civil Rights Movement, the label of schizophrenia was used to discredit black men as paranoid and violent (as Jonathan Metzl shows in his searing and meticulous history). This is just one example of how the instability of diagnostic categories stems from something far more complex than mere clinical incompetence; they are a vestige of culture and history, and they blur as times change. Psychologists and psychiatrists are so aware of this problem that it’s common, in academic spaces, to hear Plato’s phrase, “carving nature at its joints”, employed to question just how accurate our diagnostic categories are.

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So why should we trust medicine to diagnose mental illness? Increasingly, we don’t. In the past, we assumed that someone would present with the question “what’s wrong with me, doctor”, and wait for a diagnosis to be handed down to them from a clinical authority. Without getting into the debate between gender critical pundits and trans liberation activists, one way in which transgender discourse has changed how we view mental health is the idea that one can self-diagnose. Part of the so-called trans tipping point is a new way of relating to medical authorities whereby patients, trans or not, come to clinics quite sure of what’s going on with them — and what they need.

This self-election is a particular sticking point in and out of the trans community. Do you have to medically transition to be trans? Do you have to have so-called “gender dysphoria” (a category recently renamed “gender incongruence”)? That these questions are even up for debate indicates a massive shift in our attitudes to diagnosis. And, critically, the centre of the debate is not in hospitals or universities but on message boards and in the writing of patients, particularly young patients, rather than clinicians.

The argument over transgender medical care often comes down to the idea that children, especially trans-identifying children, are somehow being victimised by the illegitimate or unethical authority of either pro-trans adults or gender critical adults. While some claim to be worrying about potential detransitioners, my instinct about many people’s underlying concern is the same as the one plaguing the discourse around mental health generally: who can take care of us? Who has our best interests at heart? Can we trust doctors? Does anyone really understand the boundary between sickness and wellness? The uncertainty about the answer to these questions makes almost all of us uneasy, driving us into polarised positions and moral panic.

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It is tempting, especially for me as a mental health professional, to be anxious about and critical of the diminution of clinical authority. In the clinic, I frequently find myself confronted with the risks of handing the power of diagnosis to adolescents who are struggling with self-concept and inspired by two-minute confessional videos they’ve seen online. Still, when I consider the rustiness of our diagnostic categories and the ways mental healthcare, at least in the US, has been decimated by insurance companies and for-profit care, I am not sure that giving sole authority to clinicians has worked all that well either. In answering the question about who should be in charge of diagnosis, many people have good reasons for staking their positions. Many people have suffered because of inept psychiatry. But people self-diagnosing or rejecting diagnosis altogether may run into problems, too.

A paradigm shift is overdue — and appears to be beginning, though the exact shape of the future’s more democratic, more evidenced-based psychiatry is still nascent. Our ability to come up with new ideas and experiment with them will be critical. Recently the novelist Tao Lin wrote about autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that presents two radical ideas. The first is that he feels he was able to make himself “less autistic” through treatment, including recreationally using the drug MDMA. He does not describe lessening his symptoms, but rather lessening the disorder itself — flying in the face of clinical consensus that ASD is basically an unchanging brain disease.

Second, he raises serious questions about the pluralistic, inclusive, United-Colours-of-Benetton-esque view of neurodivergence, popular among the same teens filling social media with mental illness content from which my clients self-diagnose. The point is to accept and even celebrate disorders as a unique and valuable “part of you”. But Lin makes the case that there are chemical and industrial by-products that could account for the decades-long uptick in ASD, and that by uncritically embracing neurodivergence, we occlude the possibility of asking corporations and regulators to be responsible for what he believes is effectively poisoning people.

While I don’t agree with Lin word-for-word (I tend to think there are both advantages and disadvantages to pluralism, and I can’t speak to the science about the origins of autism), I did learn from his efforts to reframe these issues. His essay is a strong case for centring the voices of people who actually experience illnesses, rather than allowing the voices of clinicians to them drown out. Without listening to the people we diagnose, clinicians have time and again shown themselves to commit errors at best, and atrocities at worst.

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Still, I reluctantly defend my profession’s authority. Despite there being problems within the categories we wield, our knowledge — gained both from abstract research and from simply spending careful, attentive time with hundreds and hundreds of patients — is useful in making sense of the more acutely distressing parts of what we call mental illness. The future of mental health diagnoses will have to be a negotiation between clinicians and the people they seek to treat (as well as the social and cultural context that clinicians and patients co-inhabit, which plays a critical part in how we define and experience psychological variations which then get labelled as disorders).

It won’t be easy to reach a compromise between researchers, clinicians and patients. But possible new paradigms of diagnosis are starting to emerge. There is Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Theory (NDST), for instance, which models psychiatric issues the same way we model incredibly complex ecosystems or financial markets. Within this framework, something like bipolar disorder would have multiple interlocking roots, ranging from better-understood biopsychosocial factors, such as a person’s genetic vulnerabilities, to more postmodern considerations such as the culture of a given psychiatric hospital. The relationship of these factors determines whether the mind holds steady, collapses or glitches under certain kinds of stress; understanding the interplay, in all its complexity, promotes what we might call “dynamic stability”. A skyscraper moving gently in a mild earthquake is a good metaphor for how the mind can weather certain shocks if properly prepared. While NDST is not the sole answer, it is one useful framework for pinning down, or at least functionally describing, what a diagnosis is.

A crisis of authority is not a bad thing, especially if the status quo is dysfunctional. It does, however, create anxiety. A new patient in my office last week asked me if I could capture his distress in a diagnosis. I replied that it sounded like some of his symptoms were anxious, and some were depressive, but that I didn’t have enough information to make a clear categorisation, and that the category itself might leave something to be desired.

We talked about how it felt for him to hear that. He said it was uncomfortable, but he also ventured that, without a category to make meaning for him, he would have to make meaning out of his symptoms himself. That process is what my co-workers and I are trying to enable. The aim is to help young people interpret their experiences with curiosity — even if they come to us longing for the clarity falsely promised by our flawed diagnoses.

Surely moral progress has stamped out such vicious, childish status games? Alas, no. “Contagion” provides the best explanation for why Italy’s new Prime Minister, a figure generally described by her own country’s press as “centre-Right”, has been widely described as “far-Right”. Never mind reporting accuracy, the aim is disciplinary: entire moral territories can be designated as low-status or unclean. If you touch them, you will incur Contagion.

The same dynamic also underpinned a rash of disputes last week, over the moral hygiene status of women who assert that humans can’t change sex. Such women were denied a stall at the Labour Party conference, prompting a furious salvo on Monday from Labour-supporting writer Joan Smith. Elsewhere, Arianne Shahvisi imputed recently in the London Review of Books that even otherwise impeccable Left-wingers are “in league with the far-Right” if they cling to the notion that humans are born either male or female.

And Shahvisi’s response to a letter protesting this framing recounts how a teacher shamed her by comparing her views to those of Margaret Thatcher. Shahvisi approvingly describes internalising the following lesson in political groupthink: “if you don’t like the fact that you share a view with someone objectionable, consider revising that view”.

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Contagion, you see, is a radically movable feast. There is no person, principle or — as evidenced by the expulsion of basic biology from acceptable Labour Party discourse — objective fact that can’t be rendered beyond the pale, if someone with enough social clout makes it the butt of a Contagion game. And those (such as, by her own account, Arianne Shahvisi) who are both socially attuned and morally ductile will fall uncomplainingly into line.

This poses a conundrum for those women who find themselves unable to follow Shahvisi across the line of principle-free tribalism into fairy-tales about the total malleability of our sexed bodies. These “gender critical” feminists are often otherwise fiercely, passionately Left-wing — or at least were, until the Contagion game abruptly re-designated them as fash.

Some bridle at having been thus infected, and seek to clear their own names — not least by launching drives to expel any taint of “the far-Right” from among their own ranks. The latest such skirmish, in a long-running battle, concerns a recent Brighton rally for women concerned about trans activism, organised by “Posie Parker”. Real name Kellie-Jay Keen, Posie is a punchy and highly recognisable activist, whose approach to campaigning against gender ideology has had considerable viral impact. The difficulty arises in her — for some — inexcusable willingness to share airtime with the Right.

But despite all the furious debate Posie Parker’s approach has occasioned over the years, efforts to insulate gender-critical activism from accusations of being anti-progressive may be futile. For a step back from the accusation and counter-accusation reveals that for those who still know biology exists, the enemy really is progress.

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Of course when adults play Contagion, its impact goes far beyond classroom jockeying for status at the expense of a low-status scapegoat. Real, material decisions, alliances and consequences arise depending on who is considered part of the in-group, and who can be scapegoated and excluded. In terms of how it’s played by the now-dominant progressive class that controls access to so many of those resources, defending yourself from contagion means accepting the implicit premise that there exists a substantive positive set of values, towards which Progress is, well, progressing. Aligning yourself with these purported positive values makes you one of the Good People.

What, then, does this look like where women are concerned? The women’s movement is of course rich and fractious, but when we look at the big-picture changes generally trotted out as the story of feminist progress — from gaining the vote, through leaving domesticity for the workplace to controlling fertility — it’s difficult to infer any governing theme except “freedom”.

Is this just a story about values, though? You can trace much the same narrative in terms of economic transitions and technological advances: changing work patterns, labour-saving devices and — crucially — control over reproduction. All of these, too, constitute “progress”, more convincingly from some perspectives than others: on closer inspection, most of the tech-driven changes that powered women’s march toward freedom are not unambiguously beneficial, but rather produce their own winners and losers. And often, the only party for whom “more freedom” has no trade-offs turns out to be commerce: the sexual revolution, for example, delivered pros and cons for both sexes, but only benefits for the sex industry.

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“Progress”, then, is the name we give a replacement of natural limits by technological control, to the benefit chiefly of commerce. And for some time now it’s been plausible (at least for a bourgeois woman in the developed world) to act as though feminism, freedom and technology are in perpetual lockstep, as facets of “progress”. But cracks are beginning to appear.

For having freed women from a number of biophysical limits, science has rolled right on. Now, following the same broad trajectory of freedom and progress, many believe we should apply the same liberatory logic to all sexed limits. And why, indeed, should only women have the right to tinker with our endocrine systems, and only in the context of fertility? If we have the technological means, and you accept the basic premises that we’re entitled to free ourselves from sexed physiology and that liberation is generally good, why not extend radical bodily autonomy to everyone, so we can remodel ourselves as we see fit?

But it’s increasingly obvious to anyone who is paying attention that this tech transformation will — just like previous ostensibly feminist tech transformations — also come with winners and losers. And feminists were the first to notice, not least because a great many of those casualties are female, while many beneficiaries are male. The difficulty, for feminists, lies in challenging any of this without taking aim at the wider hydra of technology and progress — the very hydra that gifted us feminism in the first place. For today that hydra has an iron grip on the terms of the progressive Contagion game.

And if you look, after all, at the growing list of things recently dubbed “far-Right”, most of them are in fact assertions that we should place some limits on the forward march of commerce and technology. When you adopt the “far-Right” argument that national identity should be protected against globalisation, you’re saying there are limits to how far we can — or should — remodel the polity in the interests of growth. When you oppose natural food and health to Big Ag and the vaccine-industrial complex (two discourses which over my lifetime have migrated from Left to “far-Right”), you’re saying there are limits to how far the junk food and pharma industries should meddle in our food chains or bodies. And when you defend sex dimorphism, you’re saying there are limits to how far we can allow the biotech industry to offer (for-profit, highly lucrative) self-customisation options for our meat avatars, and to extend those options even to our kids.

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In this context, feminists find themselves in an awkward position. Because it doesn’t matter if you’re revolted by actual racism, or hardline misogyny, or radical hatred of Islam, or any of the other (actually pretty fringe) opinions held by tattooed thugs in big boots. Most people dubbed with the “far-Right” contagion don’t, in fact, hold those views. But if you’re even vestigially uncomfortable with the ongoing, tech-powered liquefaction of everything, in the name of commerce — if you show the slightest sign of questioning its self-evident moral goodness — then you’re already “aligned with the far-Right”. It’s just a question of degree.

The function of the great game of Progressive Contagion is making every possible counter-argument to the onward march of tech-enabled commerce intolerably low-status and radioactive. As such, the whole argument about whether or not gender-critical feminists are “aligned with the far-Right” is happening within a space that is already defined, by Progressive Contagion, as “the far-Right”.

No wonder, then, that Giorgia Meloni has been tarred with this brush, even if her substantive politics will, as several commentators have suggested, turn out to be quite moderate. For Meloni has positioned herself explicitly against the tech-powered liquefaction of everything in the name of commerce, thundering in her acceptance speech that “everything that defines us” — a list that for her includes faith, nationality, sex and motherhood — is now “an enemy” to “those who would like us to be perfect consumer slaves”. On a smaller scale, too, we might argue that Posie Parker’s principal crime has been refusing to disavow the possibility that there may be other limits to the liquefaction of everything, alongside sex dimorphism.

It’s of course true that people of good faith can disagree about what those other limits may be. But the other side will just call it nitpicking. No amount of protesting that you’re revolted by actual racists and the like affords any defence against this. It doesn’t matter how hygienically anyone sticks to defending sex and motherhood against Progress, or how strictly those who stray outside this narrow territory are disciplined. It’s all resistance to the juggernaut — and that, by the ever-moving goalposts of Progressive Contagion, is already “far-Right”. Those still trying to avoid infection by rushing to expel what they perceive as the real “far-Right” are, in practice, serving only to enforce a frame of reference controlled by their political enemies — and that will, in due course, be used against them.

There is no longer anywhere to stand that’s safe from Contagion. Nowhere, that is, except in accepting (like the world’s Shahvisis) that your principles, your body, and even your basic grasp of reality may be subject to dissolution and remodelling at a moment’s notice, in the name of Progress.

Given the radical scope of activist ambitions — basically, to restructure the English language so that no one refers accurately to males and females in any context it might matter — you’d think that they would be a bit more sanguine about the likelihood of an uphill struggle. But not so — every new challenge is received like an incomprehensible and crushing blow, and much drama inevitably follows.

What is it that produces such childish regression in the initiates of the new gender religion? At least part of the answer seems to have to do with the example set by Stonewall. For years now, the charity has acted like a demented primary school teacher gone rogue, encouraging all sorts of unsavoury habits in those under its influence. Via the use of an elaborate reward chart — otherwise known as the UK Workplace Equality Index — it has sown widespread misunderstanding within hundreds of institutions about the actual state of equality law. It has scared people silly with lurid fairytales of murder, suicide threats, and the hate crime of “misgendering”. No wonder the more impressionable are now getting so worked up.

The latest example of Stonewall’s wayward moral leadership came at the weekend, when it was revealed that its flounce from the government’s scheduled “Safe To Be Me” LGBT rights conference will cost the taxpayer at least £650,000, and probably more. Having previously been paid to co-organise the conference, Stonewall’s withdrawal statement was larded with the usual purple prose: hearts were heavy about the government’s U-turn on conversion therapy, trust was shattered, and so on. You would think the government had just announced compulsory heterosexuality for all, and not a pause in legislation threatening to criminalise talking therapies for gender-questioning people, including for gay adolescents at risk of starting a medicalised pathway they might later regret.

Many of those fighting Stonewall’s agenda are mothers — or as the Stonewalled maternity hospital where I gave birth twice would now have it, “pregnant people”. Since the opposition seem desperate to project their serious mummy issues onto us anyway, I reckon we should just lean into it. As most mums know, it’s important to have a few strategies ready for when things get tricky. So — with a nod in solidarity to beleaguered adults across the land having to deal with transactivist drama in their organisations, homes, and friend groups — here are five supernanny-style rules from me.

1. Encourage them to use their words

As with toddlers, in transactivism there is a lot of shouting and stamping and strutting about, but not a lot of thinking. When next a transactivist intones a Stonewall-approved mantra or slogan at you, gently encourage them to use their words and unpack it a bit. For instance, you might ask: if any male who feels like a woman is a transwoman, and transwomen are women, what then is a woman? Don’t be put off by furious complaints that you must be a bigot for asking such a thing — this is a distraction.

Equally, you could ask them: if, as Stonewall tells us, “to be nonbinary is to exist outside of society’s confines and expectations”, then what does this mean for the countless gay people who have spent their lives facing discrimination and sometimes violence because they don’t fit heterosexual norms? How does having an interesting haircut stack up against that, exactly?

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Or if, as Stonewall’s new campaign on behalf of “asexuals” tells us, a “grey-asexual” is someone who “may experience sexual attraction very rarely or only under specific circumstances”,  while “demisexual people only experience sexual attraction after developing a strong emotional bond with someone”, then in fact, aren’t most of us either grey-asexual or demisexual? And more to the point, how on earth does any of this count as a political campaign worthy of large amounts of taxpayers’ money?

2. Praise the good

When raising offspring, it’s important to positively reinforce good behaviour when you see it. This can be an effective strategy with difficult people generally. Transactivists frequently claim that they want to break down regressive stereotypes about how males and females should be. If so, tell them this is fantastic! Give them lots of praise for it — though you might also ask them how they plan to smash stereotypes, when they also seem to think that playing with dolls and wearing dresses might turn a male child into a girl.

3. Set boundaries

This appears to be a particularly hard one for transactivists to accept, tending as they do to think that all boundaries are fascist — so start small. Begin by casually saying things like “apples can’t be oranges” and “tables can’t be chairs”. (If they get cross and start calling you the “fruit police” or the “furniture police”, calmly ignore). Eventually, work your way up to males and females in non-human species on earth: “bucks are not does”, “bulls are not heifers”, and so on.

Once that information is well-tolerated, gently introduce the idea that humans are a sexually dimorphic species too; and that, as with other species, we need mutually exclusive names for the two human sexes in order to talk clearly about them. And after this radical idea has taken root, you could perhaps start to talk about other kinds of boundary too.

For instance, you could talk about the physical boundaries of women’s changing rooms and dormitories and refuges, and what those boundaries are actually supposed to do to protect their occupants from male predation. Or you could talk about the personal boundaries of women who say they don’t want men in public spaces where they undress.

At all times throughout this process, maintain your own boundaries by example. A firm and consistent “no” will be your friend.

4. Ignore derailing attempts

Kids like to copy what you just said and repeat it back to you (“no, YOU are!”). Sometimes they do it just to annoy you. At other times, it’s because they want to argue the toss but don’t know how, so just parrot a version of what you just said in the hope it will stick. In a similar vein, some transactivists like to take points originally made by gender-critical feminists and throw them back, only lightly altered.

For instance, gender-critical feminists often express concerns about the lack of safe-guarding in self-ID policies, and about the negative effects of such policies on female survivors of male sexual violence. Not to be outdone, last week my former colleague and fervent transactivist Professor Alison Phipps wrote on twitter that: “When I go in a public toilet I am incredibly vigilant — I scrutinise every woman I come across and wonder whether she is a “gender-critical feminist”. Their obsession with what’s in everyone’s pants is frightening and as a cis woman and survivor, it makes me feel very unsafe”. Now, either this displays a level of paranoia on a par with Q-Anon worries about lizard people in the White House, or it’s an unsubtle attempt to wind gender-critical feminists up.

Or take Professor Grace Lavery of Berkeley University, in the UK to punt a new book about her penis on Woman’s Hour, and who gave a talk at UCL a few weeks ago. Lavery’s talk was entitled “The Gender Critical Movement Is the Biggest Threat to Academic Freedom in a Generation”. I am told that in the talk, my name came up — you know, that former Professor who got harassed out of her job for saying that biological sex matters —  as someone supposedly personally responsible for recent serious declines in academic freedom of thought.

As with the more junior version, mindless “no YOU ares” like those of Phipps and Lavery are likely to drag you into pointless back-and-forths, which is probably the intention. Try not to let it get to you. Do what mums have done since time immemorial and pour yourself a large gin. Take a swig and read this marvellously warm, perceptive, and witty piece by English scholars Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed, written in response to an attempt of Grace Lavery — you know, that Professor who is Very Keen to protect academic freedom — to cancel them in 2018 for allegedly enabling transphobic “fascism” in their writing. (Their alleged crime, according to Lavery, was to defend the sometime use of trans birthnames and accurate sexed pronouns. And the cancellation attempt was eventually successful: the pair later released an abject apology, terrifying for its newly-leaden, generically contrite prose as much as for anything else.)

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In particular, as you read Castiglia and Reed’s piece, linger over these prescient words: “what we too often face today in the academy is something that looks less like activism or scholarship and more like adolescent acting-out. Now that scientists have decided that adolescence — itself a recently invented identity closely linked to advanced capitalism — persists into the third decade of human life, perhaps we should not be surprised to find behaviors associated with adolescents proliferating, tolerated and sometimes even encouraged within educational institutions. To be specific, we identify as adolescent the furious response to the discovery that others do not perceive you exactly the way you’d like to imagine to yourself”.

5. Get them out in the fresh air

This final one is simple enough. Get your transactivist troublemaker away from their screen or phone and into the great outdoors. Inhibit the flow of crazy pronouncements flying into innocent minds via LGBT organisations and bluetick accounts on Twitter. Encourage them instead to run around, take their shoes off and paddle, get muddy and out-of-breath, and generally to reconnect with their physical bodies and the natural world.

And if a member of the opposite sex is around, why not encourage them to arm-wrestle each other, or have a throwing contest? They both might learn something interesting. Perhaps this teaching moment could even feed into later conversations about transwomen in women’s sport

Maintaining this division is fundamental to maintaining the belief that a thing called gender identity — and gender identity only — explains individuals’ decisions to transition. It’s a belief in gender identity that allows the broadcaster Natasha Devon to write: “A trans woman is just as much a woman as I am — just a different sort of woman, with different needs.”

Once you accept the existence of some kind of internal, inherent womanhood it becomes possible to argue that physical sex is a triviality that must be looked past. The flesh is a faulty representative of the true self within, and the path to enlightenment comes when you learn to trust other people’s accounts of themselves over your own lying eyes.

With the principle of gender identity in place, you can even argue that it’s female people who are the blithely privileged ones, while male people (who, of course, must not be called male) have the wisdom instilled by disadvantage. The trans writer Julia Serano — who used the term “subconsious sex” in preference to “gender identity” — put it like this:

“Many cissexual people seem to have a hard time accepting the idea that they too have a subconscious sex — a deep-rooted understanding of what sex their bodies should be. I suppose that when a person feels right in the sex they were born into, they are never forced to locate or question their subconscious sex, to differentiate it from their physical sex. In other words, their subconscious sex exists, but it is hidden from their view. They have a blind spot.”

In short: if you have doubts about whether your sex is, in fact, best defined by an immaterial sense of self which you have never personally experienced, then you should stow your questions because all they betray is your own good fortune at not being trans. Lucky you, you must just love your gender role.

And if you suggest that the category we call trans might actually be a mix of several different things manifesting in distinctive ways within certain groups — if, say, you suggest that a woman with a complicated history of trauma fleeing femaleness might not be having exactly the same experience as middle-aged male posing in makeup — then god help you. Above all, never conceive that some instances of male transition might contain something distinctively sexual.

In 2003, the academic Michael Bailey published a book called The Man Who Would Be Queen, a dishy pop-science take on transsexuality (before that term was verboten) based on his own lengthy and sympathetic engagement with the trans community. It put forward the argument, drawn from sexologist Ray Blanchard, that males who transition fall, roughly, into two types.

The “homosexual transsexual” (usually young, gay and effeminate) is attracted to men and seeking to be attractive to men. So far, so much what most people suspected about the motivation for transition. But the second type was a more psychologically complex proposition. The “autogynephile transsexual” was often older, usually straight, tended to have a history of crossdressing — and was driven by an intense attraction to the idea of himself as a woman.

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Does it matter why people experience themselves as being trans? For the individual concerned, perhaps not: when one reaches the point of misery with one’s physical body at which transition seems the only liveable choice, the backstory probably feels very much beside the point.

But for clinicians, studying the reasons for something as unusual as the drive to change sex can be important in helping direct patients to the most appropriate path. Gender reassignment surgery is a drastic process, and it makes sense to explore whether someone’s issues might be resolved by another means. And more than that, it’s just interesting. Humans are strange and complicated creatures. Understanding them is more than a life’s work.

As far as trans activists of the early noughties were concerned, though, this specific thing was not supposed to be understood. For addressing the theory of autogynephilia, Bailey was subjected to a life-ruining campaign of harassment. His professional reputation was assassinated; his family was abused. In her exhaustive and riveting investigation into the controversy, Alice Dreger found that even before Bailey’s critics had read the book, they’d concluded that its contents would be dangerous.

It became vital to establish that the autogynephilia theory was, as Serano wrote, “based on dubious evidence and has never been scientifically substantiated”. It could even, said Serano, be considered sexist — an outcome of “our cultural tendency to sexualize femininity and femaleness in all its forms”. And yet, infuriatingly for the cause, the sex keeps seeping into transwomen’s accounts of themselves.

It’s there is Caitlyn Jenner’s The Secrets of My Life, when she writes about the thrill of seeing her reflection in full feminine dress: “Sometimes I wonder if dressing up like this is the equivalent of having sex with myself, male and female at the same time.”

It’s there is Juno Dawson’s teacherly book The Gender Games, which breaks off from informing readers of the correct way to think about gender to tell us how, when living as a gay man, Dawson had felt “a very conscious urge to get fucked, to be penetrated as a woman would be”.

It’s there, extravagantly, in Andrea Long Chu’s Females: A Concern, which defines the “barest essentials” of “femaleness” as “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes”. It’s there in Torrey Peters’ spiritedly indecent novel of queer families and sissy fetishes, Detransition, Baby. (One trans reader’s first reaction to the novel’s compulsive bean-spilling was to say: “I’m upset that the cis are going to read it”.)

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And it’s there in Grace Lavery’s memoir Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis. “There’s also the fear that what I write will be used against trans people in some way,” sighs Lavery, before jumping in anyway and describing the desire to be “fetishized… as a slutty girl is” and “assaulted as a girl is”.

Where you won’t find it, on the whole, is in testimonials by trans men. Gabriel Mac, in New York Magazine, concludes post-transition that he is in fact asexual. Thomas Page McBee’s autobiography Man Alive describes a history of terrible abuse leading to nightmarish depersonalisation: “I felt like a marionette, otherworldly and wooden.” The experiences fantasised about by Lavery did not confirm McBee’s femininity but broke the bond between self and body.

Trans men do get horny — the startlingly frank diaries of bathhouse denizen Lou Sullivan are one example, the career of porn star Buck Angel another — but there’s an undeniable sex divide here. Living as the opposite sex can be arousing for male transitioners, while female transitioners often experience it as something more like a respite from the demands of being a body.

This is, or should be, expected. Paraphilias — or fetishes — are wildly more common among male subjects than female ones. But it’s a paradox too. It means that male-to-female transitioners are, on the whole, becoming women in a specifically masculine way; and female-to-male transitioners are becoming men in a way that is characteristically feminine. The change of gender only reasserts the starting point.

Without wanting to traduce my whole sex, women can be sometimes wilfully naive about the force of masculine sexuality — and the range and strangeness of masculine desires. Paraphilias are not only more common in men, but also much more acceptable, on the whole, to men than they are to women. Tell a woman about the weird shit that gets you off, and you run a high risk of leaving her disgusted. It’s that disgust, I think, that leads some women to downplay the importance of sex for male people who want to be seen as women.

But it’s easier to believe comforting falsehoods about a universal gender identity (whatever one of those is) than to accommodate the sticky mess that male sexuality can be. As Debbie Hayton has written in these pages, in an essay entitled “Why I became trans”: “the concept of gender identity has been comforting and politically useful for autogynephilic transsexuals in a society that stigmatises unusual male sexuality”. This feminine coyness creates a strange situation where trans women can tell the dirty truth about themselves until they’re blue in the face, and kind-hearted women of the Natasha Devon tendency will pretend they never heard them.

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It’s why the Marie Claire review of Detransition, Baby doesn’t mention the kinky stuff but does suggest that “cisgender women can learn a great deal about gender, motherhood, and queer identity from Peters”. It takes skill to distil wholesome self-improvement from a novel where one trans woman character declares “I want a man to love me so much he murders me”, but part of the art of femininity has always been the ability to prettify unpleasantness.

It’s not ladylike to comment on indecent things. The proper role of women is to demurely support the masculine quest for satisfaction. Amy Bloom’s superb 2002 “Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses” — which predates current doctrines about gender identity — describes a subculture in which husbands can revel in their feminine side by dressing up.

But they can only do this because their wives are there to do the less attractive but equally feminine work of looking after them. Wives help with makeup; wives advise on clothes. Wives continue to do all the things wives traditionally do. “For twenty years he couldn’t help with the dishes because he was watching football. Now he can’t help because he’s doing his nails. Is that different?” grouches one woman who, despite her obvious dissatisfaction, has still gone along to support her husband on a crossdressing retreat.

The horror at the idea of women bucking their allocated role as support humans explains why some feminist writers have received shocked pushback when quoting the trans women I’ve referenced above. A male writer can self-disclose with impunity, but when a woman draws attention to it, suddenly everyone gets uncomfortable. The quotes must be “out of context” — surely Chu can’t really mean the essence of woman is an “expectant asshole”? And yet that is what Chu wrote, so that is what we must believe was meant.

Is there anything wrong with a weird sexual predilection? In itself, no: what happens between brain and genitals to get the latter going is the definition of a private affair. So there really ought to be no cause for embarrassment about the fact that some trans women have a sexual component to their transition. If the activists keep lying about it, it’s because they’re the ones who are ashamed of it.

Last week, she posted a poem online declaring that if only she’d been Vladimir Putin’s mum, he would have been “so loved, held in the arms of joyous light” that instead of “calling Mother Russia” and rolling the tanks toward Kiev, he’d have phoned Mother AnnaLynne. And she would have saved him from this terrible deed, “with the love only a mother can give”.

Something of the same faith in a mother’s power to create the world you want for your child, out of raw love and determination, suffuses Marlo Mack’s How To Be A Girl. A memoir of raising her transgender daughter, referred to in the book as “M”, it captures convincingly the fierce determination mothers have to lay down their lives for their children’s wellbeing.

But is love really enough to protect a child from pain? This is a complicated question. It’s not so long ago that Western mothers were encouraged to leave babies to cry, to “exercise their lungs”; in other cultures mothers willingly subject their daughters to painful FGM. Mothers in every age have faced death or worse to protect their children to their utmost power; but what we seek to protect our children from varies enormously.

Mack describes how, age four, ‘M’ said to her: “Something went wrong in your tummy” that “made me come out as a boy”. She describes M sobbing: “Put me back, so I can come out again as a girl.” How to respond? We allow or fend off suffering for our children according to a wider moral framework. And reading How To Be A Girl, it’s clear that Mack and I both love our children, but differ significantly in that framework.

In contrast to my British pessimism, she inhabits a Democrat-voting Seattle milieu, whose culture draws on a West Coast American tradition that prioritises individualism and empathy. In the influential words of 20th-century Californian psychotherapist Carl Rogers, this view argues that within each of us exists an “actualising tendency” that draws us organically toward becoming our true selves. For Rogers, all we need to “actualise” is “unconditional positive regard”.

Within the Hollywood-individualist worldview, adult violence, cruelty and aggression are caused by a lack of love and acceptance: the deficit McCord believes now drives Russian aggression in Ukraine. “If I was your mother,” says McCord in her address to Vladimir Putin, “I’d have died to make you warm.”

If I believed, like Rogers or McCord, that adult wrongdoing is driven by lack of love and acceptance, I expect I, too, would go to great lengths to provide my child with an adequate supply of “positive regard”. I expect, in other words, that I’d do much as she does: accept her child’s right to self-define. This leap of faith and validation made, she describes the relief she and her ex-husband both experience: “Before, everything was tense and contested, everything was a fight. Afterward, we were at peace.”

I expect I’d move mountains, as she does, to see that this extends beyond just the family and all the way out into the world. She even starts a playgroup for trans children, calling it the “Be-Your-True-Self Play Group”. How To Be A Girl shows the degree to which a mother’s love can reshape reality itself. And it also shows the power such commitment has, in an age where many are desperately in search of something to believe in.

For if we’ve always put together competing stories from the same facts, today’s culture is perhaps unique in the tools it offers us to project our worldview digitally into the wider world. But while you might think seeing so many different perspectives would enable greater empathy, in fact the reverse seems to be happening: evermore antagonistic filter bubbles have emerged, tranforming into communities of belief: a process Katherine Dee calls “fandomification”.

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How To Be A Girl recounts, in microcosm, the formation of just such a “fandom” or community of belief. Having decided to reorder reality around her child’s own sense of self, Mack is then committed to projecting this sovereign right to self-define out into the wider world. She recounts the emotional rollercoaster of telling family, then the neighbours; finding a school where her child can “be a girl”. And increasingly, these choices — all rooted in a clearly sincere commitment to holding her child “in the arms of joyous light” — come to shape and define Mack’s own life and activities, drawing her deeper into the trans-rights community of belief via the community she builds both in real life and online.

First she joins a support group for parents of “trans kids”. She starts blogging, and receives heartfelt positive feedback (as well as death threats) from strangers. She joins a local Trans Pride march, attends conferences, receives media inquiries. She starts a podcast with her child.

The story opens with her divorce and her child “coming out” as transgender; both lives are rebuilt over the course of the book, around M’s transness. But the only question she receives about the all-encompassing nature of this project is from a man she is dating, who asks her: “You’re so into this transgender thing… It’s your daughter who’s transgender, right?”

Instead of hearing this as a question about her embrace of the trans-rights fandom, though, Mack interprets this as him asking if she is in fact transgender. She dismisses this as absurd and offensive and dumps him. There’s no question of making space within the world she’s constructing for the possibility that it has an outside.

But it does have an outside. I, for example, do not believe all the evil in the world can be cured by maternal love, or indeed that humans can change sex. How To Be A Girl meant, for me, stepping out of the gender-critical filter bubble into the world as it appears to a woman who has staked not just her own identity and social world but literally her child’s body on believing gender identity is real. Doing so was like visiting the Upside Down.

Mack and I share numerous reference points on the topic of transgender rights, but are familiar with radically opposing interpretations of them. She takes at face value the (debunked among gender-critical feminists) statistic about the high risk of suicide among trans children, for example, while treating as debunked the study, widely cited in gender-critical circles, about the high percentage of trans children who desist if left alone.

Elsewhere she curates stories in a way that’s a photographic negative of the one I’m accustomed to. She notes, for example, that the pioneer of “watchful waiting” in gender-identity treatment, Kenneth Zucker, was “fired” from the clinic he ran, and the clinic itself “shut down pending an investigation of its practices”. Move the picture, though, and the optical illusion changes. Zucker was eventually paid $586,000 in damages after it was ruled that he was wrongfully dismissed; the question is whether that gets reported.

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Similarly, in her discussion of America’s “bathroom bill” court cases, she states that there “wasn’t any evidence” that “men posing as transgender women were infiltrating changing rooms”. But step into the other fandom, and you’ll soon hear about the evidence.

In the online battles over which facts to curate, it’s easy to forget that what’s at stake is real people, with real lives, and — as is clearly the case with Marlo Mack — real love for a real child. But this doesn’t make the escalating contest between incompatible fandoms less intense. Quite the opposite. For if there’s a common theme to the bitterest online disputes, it’s they’re rooted in questions that, somewhere at least, someone is willing to stake living bodies on.

It’s perhaps telling that Mack’s story ends with M aged 13. Transition has, up to that point, only resisted social norms; the reader is spared the far more gruelling and invasive fight against biological ones. But the blocker is inserted, and the book ends with M “excited to be growing up”. And speaking of M’s participation in a long-term study on trans kids, Mack rejoices that “Our kids would be part of a historic cohort”.

Move the picture, though, and the image changes: another way of saying this might be “conducting medical experiments on children without a control group”. Regardless, Mack is willing to stake her child’s body on her convictions — and in a post-Christian culture desperately searching for meanings, it’s no wonder competing online communities of belief take shape around such certainty. And this in turn forces us to confront the fact that disputes with real stakes in real bodies aren’t like arguments over fictional fandoms. Some battles between filter bubbles really are zero-sum.

You can read books that say reality should be re-ordered to accommodate children like M, and others that say humans can’t change sex. If it doesn’t affect you, you can murmur about the “marketplace of ideas”. But which fandom sets the rules for life in the material world is a political question, and on matters that affect the wider legal or cultural framework, there is nowhere neutral to stand.

Mack is willing to swim against the tide of biology, transform an entire legal system, hammer other people’s use of language into new shapes, for the sake of her child. And as she recounts the role her struggle plays in her own identity, as well as M’s, it’s increasingly clear that succeeding is an existential matter for both of them. This is emotive enough when what’s at stake is children’s wellbeing. But when it’s the life and death of an entire nation, everything intensifies again: the appeal of joining one or another fandom, the impossibility of neutrality, and the incapacity to think long-term about wider material consequences.

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As we sidle along the edge of nuclear precipice, in the world’s first very online viral war, it’s increasingly clear how easy it is to slide from mutually antagonistic online bubbles powered by love and good intentions, to a world where people call for actual real-world Armageddon on the basis of internet-powered belief. If I have any hope at all of averting catastrophe, it lies in perhaps the most powerful force there is, a force I still have in common with Marlo Mack, despite our radically competing worldviews: we love our children.

As How To Be A Girl amply illustrates, this can be turned to many uses. Loving parents determined to reorder reality around their adored child may drive radical changes across the social, legal and political fabric while ignoring serious knock-on effects elsewhere. But the love we have for our children is also the beginning of life in common.

Anyone raising children needs a community. Most mothers, when they become mothers, set about building one. We can only hope that this need we still have for one another is enough to keep our fraying public life from total conflagration — or, if the worst comes to the worst, to rebuild it from the ashes.

The Handmaid’s Tale describes a futuristic puritan patriarchy in which women have been stripped of their liberties and forced into service as child-bearers for the ruling class. A television adaptation was already in development when Trump was elected, but its arrival in the spring of 2017 felt tailor-made for the moment — and its imagery, especially those blood-red robes with their creepy, face-obscuring bonnets, was too instagrammable to resist. In June that year, the New York Times noted that Handmaid costumes had become de rigueur at protests against everything from Planned Parenthood funding cuts in Washington, D.C. to abortion restrictions in Ohio.

Meanwhile, Atwood was newly hailed as a modern-day Cassandra, one whose warnings we could no longer afford to ignore. As one Guardian columnist wrote, “The world of Offred, though still notionally a fiction, has migrated from creative construct to the realm of the thinkable.”

Atwood, it should be said, never quite bought into the vision of herself as the oracle of the Trump resistance. When pressed, her responses were invariably judicious — “We’re not living in Gilead yet, but there are Gilead-like symptoms going on”, she told one interviewer — though media coverage framed them as anything but. The most striking example of this is her New York Times retrospective on The Handmaid’s Tale, written in March 2017: the headline reads, “Margaret Atwood on What The Handmaid’s Tale Means in the Age of Trump”. The essay doesn’t mention him.

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And there were hints, always, that Atwood wasn’t quite as gung-ho for the new feminism as some pretended. In 2016, she was a signatory on a letter demanding accountability in the case of Stephen Galloway, a professor who was accused of sexual assault and fired without due process by the University of British Columbia. (A defamation suit by Galloway is ongoing in the Canadian courts.) Atwood’s 2018 essay about the matter became Twitter’s outrage du jour and caused the website Vox to downgrade Atwood’s status from “feminist icon” to “problematic fave”. Atwood’s response was a bone-dry tweet:

Taking a break from being Supreme Being Goddess, omniscient, omnipotent, and responsible for all ills. Sorry I have failed the world so far on gender equality. Maybe stop trying? Will be back later. (Next incarnation maybe.)

— Margaret E Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) January 14, 2018

Yet any qualms about Atwood’s ideological purity were eclipsed at the time by her usefulness to the movement. Simply put, people wanted to wear Handmaid’s Tale outfits in front of the Supreme Court more than they wanted to purge the author for being a little too agnostic on #MeToo.

But fast-forward to our present day: The Handmaid’s Tale has long since finished its four-season run on Hulu. The #MeToo movement is yesterday’s news. And that fervour for protecting women’s bodies — from government overreach and groping hands alike — has been increasingly replaced by a base-level discomfort with women’s bodies, not just as a discussion topic, but as a concept. By the time Atwood came under fire again, this time for retweeting an article observing the bizarre retreat of the word “woman” from the public sphere, the cultural tides had turned. The enemy in the Oval Office was gone; the feminist eye of Sauron turned inward.

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And for the same movement that once hailed Atwood as a prophet because she wrote so searingly about how women’s bodies and biology become the subject of oppression, now she was vaguely suspicious — for the exact same reason.

Atwood, as usual, is not interested in what you think of her — nor in placing herself into an ideological box that would make her easy to dismiss. Her new book of essays, Burning Questions, is ironically titled: the new feminism is desperate to know Atwood’s stance on gender ideology, but in interviews, Atwood has artfully refused to be pinned down. Those looking for an answer won’t find it here.

Still, it’s hard to imagine that she’s surprised by the turn the feminist movement has taken towards purging those women, and particularly women of a certain age, who won’t toe the line on its uptake of the latest in gender ideology. Insofar as Atwood can predict the future, it’s always been because she pays attention to the past. “I believed two things. (1) That if true believers say they’ll do a thing, when they get the chance they’ll do it. (2) Whoever says “It can’t happen here” is wrong. Anything can happen anywhere, given the right conditions, as history has demonstrated time and time again,” she writes, in the essay titled “Reflections on The Handmaid’s Tale“.

And the social disposability of women who are past childbearing age and hence no longer serve any social purpose (the unspoken subtext: to men) is one of those time-and-time-again themes. From the 19th century medical consensus that menopausal women might as well die off, having outlived their usefulness, to the dearth of roles for women over 40 in Hollywood, to the shared (and oft-written-about) feeling among middle-aged women that they’ve somehow become invisible. And while feminism has long pushed back against the patriarchy that pushes older women into obscurity, it turns out we’re not above engaging in our own little litmus tests for the grande dames who won’t get with the times.

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Yesterday’s feminist heroes — the Atwoods, the Rowlings, the second-wavers writ large — are today subject to interrogation about where their loyalties lie. If they don’t pass the test, into the bin they go. The new feminist wields the word “terf” to the same end as the men’s rights activists who deem us “unfuckable”, hence useless: it’s a label designed to deem its wearer irrelevant, out of bounds, voiceless.

Seen from certain angles, there’s something peculiarly optimistic about all this, as if feminism has so thoroughly won the battle for women’s bodily autonomy that it need not be our primary concern. In fact, all this discussion of women and bodies is actually offensive and unnecessary and should no longer take place (or if it must, we should at least have the decency to leave the W-word out of it and say “people with cervixes” instead). There are echoes of the past here, too: in her notoriously negative review of The Handmaid’s Tale for the New York Times in 1986, Mary McCarthy declared the novel too dystopian to be believed, an alternate history of a culture war that had already been thoroughly won. “Even when I try, in the light of these palely lurid pages, to take the Moral Majority seriously, no shiver of recognition ensues”, she wrote.

Today’s insistence that feminism should pivot away from women’s bodies and toward inclusivity and diversity suggests that The Handmaid’s Tale has been deemed an irrelevant and impossible fiction once again — even as Roe v. Wade, the landmark US Supreme Court case that legalised abortion, is facing its most serious threat in decades. One gets the sense of an army wandering off its longtime battlefield in search of a new conflict, a giant MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner floating down to cover the few red-robed protesters still lingering at the front.

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Maybe that pivot is the right choice, or maybe not; as Atwood notes, “There is no such thing as being on the wrong side of history — if history means who’s in political power and who’s not, and who’s in intellectual fashion and who’s not, because history of that kind doesn’t have sides.”

But while we’ll have to wait for the benefit of hindsight before those purged from the movement emerge in the rear-view as either traitors or martyrs, we can consider one thing now: who benefits from this moment of intra-feminist conflict? Who is watching, hungrily, as we tear each other apart?

This is the kind of question Atwood doesn’t ordinarily shy away from answering, unconcerned as she is with which ideas are currently in vogue. Not only that, it’s one she has answered, in the essay titled, “Am I a Bad Feminist?” Written for The Globe and Mail in 2018 after she ran afoul of the #MeToo orthodoxy, it is reproduced in Burning Questions — but with a curious omission: one that seems to illuminate the limits of Atwood’s bravery when it comes to the changing landscape of feminism and the issues that put us at each other’s throats. Four years ago, when the dissident feminist’s topic was the excesses of #MeToo, the last paragraph of this essay included a barn-burner of a line:

“A war among women, as opposed to a war on women, is always pleasing to those who do not wish women well.”

But that was then, and this is now — in a world where the feminist movement is tearing itself apart not over sexual mores, but gender ideology. And in the version of this essay that appears in Atwood’s new book, that final warning has been left out.

It’s funny. Obviously the columnist has not been silenced; there he is, making lots of noise, in places where lots of people can hear him. 

Like lots of good political cartoons, it makes a case quickly and pithily, and it is very hard to argue against. But I want to try. 

The argument, with or without the cartoon, crops up an awful lot. “I’VE BEEN SILENCED!!!! suzanne moore cries, from the front page of a national newspaper,” tweeted one journalist, in response to an interview with Moore in the Telegraph and her piece in these pages last month. “The author of a book on the supposed ‘transgender craze seducing our daughters’ claims she is being silenced. It is a very loud silence,” ran the subtitle of a recent piece in The New Republic, about the author Abigail Shrier.

Or: “I would pause, for at least a few seconds,” wrote a columnist in the Guardian last year, of the historian Niall Ferguson, “if I found myself arguing that my freedom of speech was in a state of extreme jeopardy in this, my column in a national newspaper.” Current Affairs, 2018: “Pretty loud for being so silenced.” Also from 2018, the New Statesman: “If the “Intellectual Dark Web” are being silenced, why must we keep hearing about them?” 

As it happens, Moore never claimed (as far as I know) that she was being silenced: she said that it was becoming harder to express certain views. But the general question remains: is it possible for these people and their opinions to be simultaneously “silenced” and also widely expressed?

Obviously, if we take the word “silenced” to mean “literally made silent; unable to put their words out into the world at all”, then none of the above has been silenced . Their words are out there.

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But if the only people who have permission to complain about being silenced are the ones who are literally silenced, then — by definition — we will never hear about it. I would say it is perfectly possible for people to try to silence you. They might even be successful at partially silencing you, or reducing your output, or making you nervous to say things – even if they aren’t able to shut you up entirely. And I would say that even if they aren’t successful in the specific case of the famous person involved, it can still have free speech implications for other people.

A word of warning: I’m going to draw an analogy now. I can imagine that people will read it and say “oh so you’re saying that people being rude on Twitter is the same as a death threat,” so I wanted to get out ahead of that: it is not what I am doing. Philosophical analogies are meant to draw out our intuitions and find out where they break down, not say “X is exactly like Y”. With that said, here’s the analogy.

In 1989, the novelist Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses was the subject of a fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini. He spent several years in hiding, under police protection; a $3 million bounty was offered for his death (with an extra $600,000 being added in 2016). The Japanese translator of the book was murdered; the Italian translator was stabbed, and the Norwegian publisher was shot, although both, mercifully, survived.

Was Rushdie being silenced? Well, he wrote several times for national newspapers during his period in hiding. He appeared on television and Radio 4 to discuss it. He even turned up on stage during U2’s 1993 tour promoting their Zooropa album. “I’VE BEEN SILENCED!!!! salman rushdie cries, from the stage of wembley stadium.”

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To reiterate: I’m not saying that Suzanne Moore or the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ are equivalent in any sense to Rushdie, or that they have been subject to the same level of threat as a fatwa and $3 million bounty. The point is that, if you accept that Rushdie was in some sense being “silenced”, then you acknowledge that it is possible for people to be simultaneously highly visible, with a platform to say the things they want to say, while also having their free speech curtailed: that it is possible to shout, truthfully, that you are being silenced from the front page of a national newspaper.

Of course, you may not accept that Rushdie was being silenced. This would, in fact, be a fairly reasonable position. The stated aim of the fatwa was not to silence Rushdie, to get him to retract the book, or anything – it was to kill him. According to Khomeini’s office, media reports that the fatwa would be lifted if Rushdie apologised were false: “Even if Salman Rushdie repents and become the most pious man of all time, it is incumbent on every Muslim to employ everything he has got, his life and wealth, to send him to Hell.”

And this brings us to a second point. I’d say that there probably was a chilling effect on Rushdie himself, but you may disagree. But again: the point was not to silence Rushdie. It was to silence other people. In 2006, after the controversy about a Danish newspaper publishing cartoons showing images of Mohammed, the leader of Hezbollah expressed regret that the fatwa had been unsuccessful: “If there had been a Muslim to carry out Imam Khomeini’s fatwa against the renegade Salman Rushdie, this rabble who insult our Prophet Muhammad in Denmark, Norway and France would not have dared to do so.”

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Are people less willing to be critical of Islam or to depict Mohammed, in the wake of Rushdie’s fatwa, or the Charlie Hebdo killings, or the recent beheading of the French schoolteacher? Probably. Even if the specific target of an attempt to silence is not, in fact, silenced, other people might be. 

Again: I’m not saying that murder or the threat of murder is the same as being ostracised at work, or having people be rude to you on Twitter, or having people protest outside your talks, or whatever. What I am saying is that it is possible for people to, simultaneously, have a loud and prominent platform, and at the same time for people to be “silencing” them, or at least trying to. And, further, even if the attempted silencing doesn’t work on the individual in question, it could easily have a chilling effect on other people — especially those with less job security. We have been talking about famous people in the public eye, but we won’t hear about the less famous people who hold the same views and are now afraid to express them. The “I’M SILENCED!!! I cry from the front pages of a national newspaper” argument falls down in at least some cases.

So it is possible for a person — or at least their views — to be both loud and silenced. The question is, then (and I’ve avoided it so far): are they? Is Suzanne Moore, or Jordan Peterson, or anyone? Does what they have been subjected to amount to “silencing”, or are other people simply using their own freedom of speech to complain about or protest against them?

It’s worth noting that, although I’ve said that being rude on Twitter is not the same as a fatwa, there have been material threats to some of the people I mentioned above. Moore received messages from people saying “they were going to rape me, decapitate me, ejaculate inside my head, burn me”. Someone turned up at a Jordan Peterson meeting carrying a garrotte. UC Berkeley had to spend $600,000 on security when the IDW member Ben Shapiro made a speech there. I doubt any of them were in as much danger as Rushdie, but I can’t imagine it was pleasant.

But let’s leave that aside. If a prominent columnist has his or her column taken away (as the cartoon was about), or if there are protests outside talks, or if there is simply a storm of people being nasty about you on Twitter, can that be “silencing”, even if that person still has a prominent voice?

To some degree, this is a matter of definitions. Obviously, a lot of people on Twitter calling you nasty names is not as bad as having a fatwa on your head, but it will probably make you less willing to write about the same subject again (I have some limited experience of this). Whether that reaches the threshold of “silencing” is just a question of how you define the word.

I think in some cases it is less ambiguous, though. When an academic resigns over an email defending the right to wear potentially offensive Halloween costumes, or two others lose their jobs after arguing against a “day of absence” on campus for white people — again, it’s not as bad as credible death threats, but losing your job is quite a big deal. I could entirely understand that other academics would worry about making the same arguments, even if those ones in particular are still writing in the Wall Street Journal or whatever about their experience. I’d say there’s some silencing going on there, at least under my definition of the verb “to silence”. I certainly know some academics who tell me that there are things they believe but wouldn’t ever dare say in public. The same goes for some journalists.

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Which brings us to the final point. I think that it is possible to be both loud and silenced; and I think that in some cases, even those which fall short of the Rushdie standard of death threats and assassination attempts, it is reasonable to say that this has, in fact, happened.

The question, then, is whether that is a bad thing. The word “silenced” is one of those that most people think is automatically bad, but I don’t think that’s true: silencing Lord Haw Haw during the Second World War would have been absolutely fine by me. Silencing Osama bin Laden, in the sense of not publishing columns by him, or David Duke — also fine.

It might be fine by some means and not others, as well. Boycotts might silence people, but you might be OK with that, when you wouldn’t be with death threats to achieve the same aim.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that silencing Jordan Peterson or Suzanne Moore is equivalent to silencing David Duke. Lots of people strongly disagree with both of those authors, but they’re both within the body of mainstream opinion. Moore, for instance, seems to believe that trans people should be treated with respect and addressed with the pronouns of their choice, but that they remain their biological sex, and that there should be spaces reserved for biological females. That seems to be pretty much what the British public believe — or, at least, a majority of the public is in favour of using a trans person’s chosen pronouns, but is less likely to consider a trans person to be “really” of that gender (the poll didn’t ask about biological sex). Similarly, a majority is in favour of trans women using women’s toilets, but only in cases when that trans woman has physically transitioned.

Of course, it’s perfectly possible that the British public is wrong. If YouGov had been around in the 1810s, the results of a poll on whether or not slavery was OK would not have determined whether or not slavery actually was OK. And you might argue that people back then should have tried to “silence” Lord Nelson and others who argued in favour of slavery. But it would have been strange to do so on the basis that they were extremist outliers. And if you were to try to get people fired for those opinions, you’d end up with unemployment rates around 50%. It just doesn’t seem viable.

And on the second point, again, you might think it’s not OK to send death threats, but it’s fine to send emails to someone’s boss if they express views you disagree with. Where you draw the line is up to you. I’m fairly absolutist on this — if you disagree with someone’s view, in almost all circumstances, you should express disagreement, not attempt to make it harder for them to express those views. “Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever.” But I am aware that I am on the more extreme end of that spectrum, and many people disagree; where you draw the line is up to you (and up to society at large, as we all debate these issues).

But being silenced is not a binary condition. Someone can be prominent, and famous, and regularly appear on the television — and they, or their views, or people like them, could still be being silenced. And you shouldn’t get your political philosophy from a cartoon.

Where once a person would have assaulted another person, verbally or otherwise, to win in the era of “oppression” the would-be victor must claim that they themselves are the ones who have been assaulted. Where once the loser would have wept, today the would-be winner must weep: very early, very fast and as insincerely as occasion necessitates.

This was the case with the attack on Suzanne Moore, whose stupendous account of her fall-out with the Guardian is a fine reminder of the laws of modern combat. The people who edged her out of her place of work did not do so firstly by calling her derogatory names; they did so by pretending — falsely — that she had used such names of them. They pretended that she had been “transphobic” against them. They lied about what she had written and they pretended that her words even made them feel endangered. In doing so Moore’s accusers got their victimhood in early.

As Moore narrates, the crunch point came when a trans employee at The Guardian announced her resignation, despite having already left weeks earlier, claiming that Moore had made them feel “unsafe”. It is a clever little trick, because of course there is nothing in any Suzanne Moore column that could make anyone at the paper feel unsafe. Unless the Guardian was a well-known hotspot for gangs of volatile thugs looking to beat up trans people, which seems unlikely. The suggestion is clearly insincere or deluded.

But the trick works, because so few adults want to call bullshit on the bully-words of our time. Not just because the bully-words are the words of the oppressed, but because they come cloaked in this language of impossible-to-disprove suffering. Who are you to say that the other person does not feel “unsafe”?  How can you prove they don’t?

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Suzanne Moore’s testament of what it feels like from the inside to deal with these latter-day Torquemadas would be familiar to many working in publishing, too.

On Monday of this week Penguin Random House announced that the bestselling psychologist Jordan Peterson has a new book scheduled for release in March. Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life follows up on the huge success of Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, which sold more than 3 million copies after its release in 2018.

Just to put that in some much-needed context: when a book sells that many copies it essentially pays for almost all of the poorly-selling books that might clog up the publisher’s lists. It is the sort of book that a publishing house dreams of, one which pays the salaries of countless people as they shepherd through numerous publications which they hope might find an audience but alas don’t. For under-pressure editors, it is a lifeline.

And yet the reaction within Penguin did not appear to be uniformly positive. Indeed at a meeting organised by Penguin Random House in Canada there was quite a scene. At an “emotional” townhall at the publishers on Monday, several employees confronted the management about their decision to publish another book by Peterson, while dozens of others staff “filed anonymous complaints”.

The complainants within Random House were apparently consistent in their line of attack. One suggested that Peterson is “an icon of hate speech and transphobia” and “an icon of white supremacy”.  One “junior employee”, who claimed to be a member of “the LGBTQ community”, said “I’m not proud to work for a company that publishes him”.

In the current economic climate it might be said that somebody of any community should be pleased — rather than proud — to work for anyone at all. Besides which, there is no right to be “proud” of the company you work for, let alone to agree with every editorial decision it makes. But by making somebody feel “un-proud” Penguin Random House has of course committed a crime against the person; they had made someone a victim.

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Some suffered even worse trauma, and according to one employee, “people were crying in the meeting about how Jordan Peterson has affected their lives”.

Of course the compassionate response might be to suggest that anyone who cries at such an occasion should ordinarily be regarded as too mentally fragile to work anywhere, let alone at a place in which such life-affecting ideas are discussed.

But it got worse, because whenever a certain number of people work out the rules of a game, and how far they are permitted to go, then some will stretch them to see how much more they can get away with. So one employee apparently claimed that publishing Peterson could negatively affect the employee’s “non-binary friend”, an especially ingenious line of argument.

The “non-binary” bully-tactic has been tried for some time, where people claim to be something they do not understand and cannot prove exists but insist gives them the right to tell everyone else what to think, say and do. But it might be regarded as something of overreach to claim that you only have to know a magical non-binary person in order for yourself to also be allowed to decide what is and is not publishable.

On and on the complaints went. One employee claimed that since June (that is, since the death of George Floyd) Penguin Random House “has been doing all these anti-racist and allyship things and them publishing Peterson’s book completely goes against this. It just makes all of their previous efforts seem completely performative.” There are many things to say in response to such a claim. One is that of course the publishing house’s previous efforts were performative. Why should a Canadian publishing house take any responsibility for the actions of a Minnesotan policeman?  Of course any and all such acts of “allyship” are completely insincere and meaningless.

Still the question lingers, which is why a book by Peterson should in some way go against what has happened since the death of George Floyd? The defamatory insinuation contains the nastiest little claim, that it is self-evident why a publisher should not publish a book by Jordan Peterson: because it is self-evident that such a book would be racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic and every other one of the other apostasising spell-words of the time.

As much as they may lament the fact, the job of a publisher is to make a profit, to publish books people actually want to buy, and were any of the complainants to be given a serious role in their company then soon they might not even have a job to feel un-proud of.

There is also a huge market at the moment for books that promote a particular progressive message, most of which are aimed at children and some of which make some fairly contentious claims; as far as anyone knows, there has never been any attempt to stop these books from being published, tedious as it is to see bookshop windows covered in them.

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Yet that tolerance cuts one-way, and of the 70 or so anonymous messages to the Penguin “diversity and inclusion committee” apparently only a couple were in favour of the decision to publish Peterson’s book. That level of intolerance and dull uniformity is striking, and suggests that these employees clearly fail to understand that feeling “hurt”, “un-proud” or having your friends feel potentially “negatively affected” are none of them reasons to refrain from publishing a book. Even if the book did not pay your salary.

What we see is a new generation of people who do not know how to think, act or behave. In some cases they genuinely haven’t grown out of the stage of development where it is appropriate to cry if you do not get your way. The answer to all this remains the same: which is that the adults must reassert themselves.

Anyone so badly affected by the potential publication of a book with which they are not in total agreement should be invited to resign from their jobs and their positions advertised the next day. The number of smarter young applicants available to replace them would — I would predict — be very large, and they would include a better class of free-thinker than the nasty little doctrinaires who have taken over the Guardian, Penguin, the New York Times and many other organs in recent years.

Both Moore and Peterson have smoked out the bullies, but it is time we saw through the principle intimidation tactic of our time, ripped away the pretence of victimhood and told the people who cry victim that we have little need of them.