Transgender rights - UnHerd

Judith Butler’s toxic nonsense

Gareth Roberts — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 23:04:23 +0000

Judith Butler, the doyenne of what is known as “theory”, is back in the discourse thanks to a Guardian interview, in which they (for it is they not she, inevitably) described, with unusual directness, people who acknowledge there are two sexes (i.e. 100% of humanity) as “fascists”. They is famous for writing thoughts on gender and culture which have all the light, straightforward readability of the users’ manual for a nuclear reactor. They’s prose makes Dominic Cummings’s blog look like AA Milne. And they is one of those soi-disant feminists who, rather surprisingly, claims to believe that women don’t actually exist.

They’s most renowned sentence, which won the 1998 Bad Writing competition in the journal Philosophy & Literature, runs as follows:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

It is a glorious racket, and you can’t help admiring it. I like to picture Judith as a snake-oil purveyor on a travelling show in the days of the pioneering Wild West, sat in the wagon after the sell, in a box-coat and a tall hat, lighting a cigar with a ten-dollar bill and having a good chuckle with the missus at the dumb rubes in the crowd. “Honey pie, those bozos sucked it up!” There’s something very funny about seeing bourgeois idiots being taken for schmucks and grandly fleeced. “Good for you gal!” you want to shout.

If this were only a few bottles of liniment sold to a few stooges it would have a roguish charm. But with the explosion of higher education and of social media, these laughable ideas are increasingly seeping out into wider society.

Judith is the undisputed master of the form, but such specious claptrap is a game anyone can play.

Let’s have a go. You take a social phenomenon or a piece of art (high or low, that doesn’t matter) and subject it to theory. To pluck a random, recent example let’s take current hit BBC drama Vigil. We might say that in its depiction of a female detective investigating a murder mystery on a submarine that it posits interiority citationally as a partial détournement of the ideological power structures of the late-capitalist ideations of guilt and innocence.

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The toxic world of fandom

By Gareth Roberts

Thanks to my university days — thirty long years ago now, but already riddled with this stuff, which goes back a lot longer than people think — I can spew this out. Once you’ve grasped the basics, it’s easy.

The difference is that back in 1992, when I’d completed my dissertation on gender norms in Carry On Loving (1970) and got my 2:1, I emerged into the real world with real people in it, and didn’t have to think about this trash again apart from as an amusing memory shared with fellow sufferers.

No such luck for the graduate of 2021, who will find the mainstream media and the arts awash with theory jargon such as “lived experience”, “intersectionality” and “equity”.

Theory stems from the deconstruction popularised, if that’s the word, in European academia in the middle of the last century — taking social conventions and art to bits to see how they work (which is something Aristotle was doing two thousand years ago, to be fair). It can be very interesting to see how ideas operate, particularly in the then under-examined and comparatively new mass popular culture. The differences in taboos and hierarchies across cultures are fascinating. And abstract, unfamiliar concepts can obviously be hard to convey and to understand.

But critical theory tips buckets of nonsense over these reasonable, even banal foundations. It has no truck with the obvious reality of humans as evolved animals like any other. All of its observations stem from the false premise of the human being as a wholly nurtured blank slate, so everything that follows on is just plain wrong. It is like a series of whodunnits where the murderer is “the capitalist hegemony” every time. It gulps down for its inspiration art, beauty and humanity — and vomits them back up as pabulum.

The observations of early pioneers in linguistics — Ferdinand de Saussure in particular, with his painstaking deliberations over the meanings of words across human languages and the way humans frame the world through language — became the baloney of saying that words actually physically change reality, so all you have to do is change words to change reality. Judith’s new Guardian interview is a shining example. Hocus pocus, alakazam — woman as a category is redefined to include blokes. The cabinet is thrown open, and the lady has disappeared.

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By Gareth Roberts

So now we have queer theory, gender theory, critical race theory, out in the open. And this stuff is dangerous when it metastasises.

Because it’s not merely an irritant. It weakens and debilitates us. It amplifies neurosis and further damages already damaged people — the shouty unicorn-avatar children of Twitter have been driven out of their tiny minds by it, to their and our detriment. It has had a terrible, deadening effect on the arts, reducing a lot of drama to nothing much more than grievance and resentment.

The irony of this situation is that loopy ideas so obviously contrary to sanity and reality as Open Borders, Defund The Police or every human interaction being racist could only have sprouted from the soil of liberal, western capitalist consumer societies. Theory is the most western belief system imaginable. Picture an intellectual movement posturing against the central tenets of Chinese or Saudi Arabian society, embedded at the heart of the academic establishment in those countries, being funded by their peoples, disinterested governments nodding it through. You can’t, because its exponents would be lucky to last the week.

Deconstruction never deconstructs itself. If it ever looked in the mirror, it would see that it is old establishment down to its toenails, a ruling class ‘progressive’ pose that belongs more to the eleventh century than the twenty-first (it’s surely no accident that the younger royalty is keen.) It’s as much a product of capitalism, and about as left-wing, as a packet of salt and vinegar crisps. It is — oh, irony of ironies! — all about strengthening existing class structures and power relations, its arcane lexicon an etiquette system. Objecting to it, or breaking a taboo by saying for example that one tries not to see race, or that there are two immutable sexes, marks a person as low-status. It is a mechanism for preserving inequalities, keeping people in their place and making racial strife worse to enhance position and keep the cash rolling in.

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The intellectual shabbiness of Judith Butler

By Sam Leith

Its opponents, on both the Left and Right, are far too squeamish. Detractors suggest that these bad ideas can be argued against and rejected — the excellent Cynical Theories by the estimable Helen Pluckrose et al makes this case immaculately. But you cannot argue with these fallacies and their perpetrators, as they grant no space to their opponents, who are by their definition oppressors, i.e. heretics. Theory cannot brook enlightened debate, because it is pre-enlightenment, a feudal power grab.

The only way to deal with it is to defund the academic institutions and courses that expound it. It must go.

Or perhaps, as Judith might say, this whole article has been an attempt to reify hegemonic power structures, resisting praxis by codifying reified systems of meaning as normative. Who can possibly tell?

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The inconvenient truth about transwomen

Debbie Hayton — Tue, 22 Dec 2020 00:00:59 +0000

The butterfly effect describes how the flapping of tiny wings in China may cause a hurricane in the Caribbean a couple of weeks later. The hurricane tearing through social policy in Scotland at the moment also had small beginnings: not in China 14 days ago but in Yogyakarta, Indonesia 14 years ago. This, however, was no accident of chaos — it was deliberate and planned.

Future historians may marvel how that meeting of human rights groups in Yogyakarta established gender identity as an innate human quality and decided that it must be protected in law. At the time, in 2006, political commentators at home were more concerned with the so-called Granita Pact, and whether Tony Blair would ever resign in Gordon Brown’s favour. But Yogyakarta triggered a chain of events that would eventually challenge the use of biological sex to divide humanity. While the definition of gender identity was vague — how can you define what is in essence a feeling in our heads? — the vision was grand.

Fast forward to 2015 and attention in the UK was turning towards our membership of the EU. However, it was the Council of Europe — the organisation that we are not leaving — that drove the agenda in Europe when it passed Resolution 2048 and called on all member states to enshrine gender identity in national law, and thereby displace biological sex. Without the democratic scrutiny that surrounded prime ministerial succession and Brexit, Resolution 2048 shook the very foundations of human society — what it means to be a man or a woman.

by the same author

A boy in a dress is just a boy in a dress

By Debbie Hayton

The impact on society is profound. At this very moment, Scotland is considering a change to the law that would allow people to change their legal sex without producing evidence of a psychological need. While they are not protecting gender identity — that would require a change to the Equality Act, which is not a devolved matter — it will have much the same effect.

“The Scottish Government seem bent on pushing badly written and poorly defined legislative change,” the Scottish campaigning group forwomen.scot tells me, “without due consideration for the potentially massive implications for the social and legal position of women in Scotland.”

Legislative change that has been planned in the dark. According to recent guidance for activists uncovered by the legal website Roll on Friday, secrecy is crucial: “Avoid excessive press coverage and exposure,” it urged. If society had been aware of the implications, those campaigners may not have been given such a free run as they lobbied governments to adopt Resolution 2048.

The tactics were highly effective. Immediately after the 2015 UK election, the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee turned their attention to Transgender Equality. Following a consultation that provoked just 208 responses, the committee report recommended that the Government should introduce self-declaration of gender, and establish gender identity as a protected characteristic. In the ensuing Parliamentary debate the Yogyakarta principles were cited as some exotic sounding authority.

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Why don't trans activists practise what they preach?

By Meghan Murphy

Elsewhere in Europe, the tide kept advancing. As Malta and then Ireland both passed laws based on Resolution 2048, liberals and progressives were kept on board or — more likely — in the dark. Meanwhile, the occasional dissenter could be denounced as a hateful bigot and probably a Nazi.

Government consultations were announced at Westminster and separately in Scotland, where gender recognition is a devolved matter. Few people cared apart from transgender activists. Small groups of women did meet to share their concerns, but their gatherings provoked outrageous responses from supposed progressives.

Politics changed at Speakers’ Corner in London on 13 September 2017 when 26-year old Tara Wolf — a self-declared trans woman — assaulted 60-year old Maria Maclachlan before one of those meetings (Wolf was fined £150 by magistrates). A group of female trade unionists decided enough was enough, and two months later their new group, Woman’s Place UK, held its first meeting in Cambridge. They drew in big name speakers including Linda Bellos and Beatrix Campbell, and the tide began to turn. Within two years they filled the QE II Conference Centre in Westminster.

In an increasingly febrile environment, governments dithered. The consultations were delayed creating a political vacuum that exacerbated the situation: hope and good will were replaced by fear and anger; compromise was out, confrontation was in.

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Has trans activism gone too far?

By Douglas Murray

Scotland consulted first. By 1 March 2018, 15,697 responses had been submitted — rather more than 208. Westminster began its consultation four months later. When it closed on 22 October that year, more than 100,000 responses filled the electronic postbag, according to unofficial reports. The official figure is still not known because over a year later the findings of the Westminster consultation remain unpublished. Priorities have moved on, and it seems unlikely that Boris Johnson’s government will want to devote any time to gender recognition legislation. If it weren’t for Scotland, that may have been the end of it.

Scotland continued to dither. They neither threw out gender recognition nor moved forwards with confidence. They drafted a bill but started consulting a second time, a process that is currently underway. It closes on 17 March this year. The outcome will be felt south of the border and beyond our shores as the world watches Scotland deal with the hurricane.

The political divisions are profound. On one side are the arguments that we trans people have a difficult time, and simplifying gender recognition makes our lives a little easier. But this is about more than trans individuals, it is about society.

Allowing male people to declare themselves female for reasons known only to themselves is open to abuse, and any law that relies on well-meaning people declaring that (abusive) men wouldn’t do that, would they? is questionable at best.

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Don't give in to the bullying trans activists

By Graham Linehan

Women’s spaces are not protected because all men present a hazard, but a few do. In the same way, we don’t lock our doors at night because all passers-by are a hazard. But in both cases, some people will abuse trust and women need to take precautions just like householders need to take precautions.

The inconvenient truth is that transwomen are male, and — as a group — we present the same hazard that men present. Women can no more differentiate nice trans from nasty trans than they can distinguish nice men from nasty men. Allowing us to declare ourselves to be trans and then immediately self-identify into women’s spaces makes the boundaries meaningless. It is a safeguarding nightmare.

This matters for Scotland. Gender recognition is a devolved matter and it is for Scotland to decide how to progress, but if they are wise they will consider what is happening across the world. In Canada, for example, where the transwoman Jessica Yaniv is making a mockery of a 2016 amendment to the British Columbia Human Rights Code that protects self-declared gender identity. Yaniv took action (later dismissed) against female beauticians for refusing to wax what would in more normal times have been considered to be male genitals.

While the Scottish government may claim in their consultation (Para 3.20) that they do “not wish trans people to go through procedures which are demeaning, intrusive, distressing and stressful”, it’s a matter of debate whether being asked to provide medical evidence of a need to change your legal sex is demeaning. I don’t think it is, though like many trans people I have never felt the need to change the sex on my birth certificate in any case. We shouldn’t need to lie about the past in order to live in the present.

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The birth of the transsexual empire

By Julie Bindel

But this matters for more than Scotland. Fourteen years after Yogyakarta the policy juggernaut has paused in the UK, but it has not gone away. The pressure from transgender activists is incessant.

While the Westminster Government may be less sympathetic to reform, how long would someone need to be resident in Scotland in order to qualify in Scotland? England and Wales would no doubt recognise Scottish paperwork — even ‘Gretna Green’ paperwork — as equivalent to our own, and come under pressure to mirror Scottish legislation. The juggernaut would spring back to life, putting three vulnerable groups at risk.

Women, who lose control of their own boundaries. If any male person can declare themselves to be a female person, those boundaries become meaningless. While few men would call themselves women just to access women’s spaces, those that would are the reason those boundaries are needed.
Children, who are told that they can choose their gender and — if they believe their body to be wrong — may end up railroaded into medical and surgical interventions. Children young enough to believe in the tooth fairy are not old enough to be put on a path that can lead to infertility, loss of sexual function, and medication for life.
Trans people who risk losing the goodwill we rely on. Attempts to change the law to our advantage by policing the words — and even the thoughts — of others will not end well for us. If the Scottish Government doesn’t see the problem, others will and those people may find popular support and rebuild society in a way that is genuinely unkind to us.

Consultations are not referenda. They are opportunities for people to pass on their wisdom and experience to inform decisions made by policy makers.

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Of course biological sex exists

By Tom Chivers

There is a debate, even among trans people. While Owl Fisher, for example, has spoken about a moral panic over transwomen using women-only services, Kristina Harrison empathised with women when she wrote: “Perhaps you can begin to understand the concerns of many women when it is increasingly being asserted in practice, if not fully in law, that simply identifying as a woman means being able to access women’s and girls’ private, formerly single-sex, spaces — toilets, rape-crisis centres and so on.”

Decisions need to take place in openness and transparency, and following widespread consultation. We can all have an opinion on something as fundamental as what it means to be a man or a woman. Is it determined by our sex, or is it a feeling in our heads? The consultation is open until 17 March, and it’s vital that we all have our say to ensure Scotland gets this right. If Scotland revises the law to allow anyone to change their legal sex, just because they want to, women, children and trans people all become hostages to fortune.

Meanwhile, 14 years after Yogyakarta, policymakers across the world will be watching Scotland weather the storm.

This article first appeared on 22 January, 2020

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Why I can’t trust Stonewall any more

Jonny Best — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 12:40:27 +0000

If ever there was a lost, screwed-up gay kid who would have benefited from the existence of an organisation like Stonewall in his childhood, it was me. Bullied, lonely, and lacking any knowledge about what it meant to be gay, but feeling a vague, dark sense that the lives I saw around me were not the same as mine — I didn’t have words to describe what I felt. At around the age of 13 I retreated into myself and was taken to a child psychologist, but I refused to speak.

I was 18 when the infamous Section 28 became law in May 1988, prohibiting the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality by local authorities. I don’t know where all this promotion was taking place but it wasn’t at my Cleethorpes comprehensive, which had covered sex education in one baffling, strictly science-only lesson. Homosexuality wasn’t mentioned, let alone advertised.

In 1989, Stonewall was founded and, thanks in large part to its careful, determined work, British society began to change for the better. Life became gradually easier and happier for lesbians, bisexuals and gay men. It was a slow process.

Fast-forward to 2006. I am 35, the artistic director of Queer Up North International Festival, and I have commissioned an educational theatre production addressing the issue of homophobic bullying in secondary schools. Stonewall is co-producing the project and I have been spending hours on the phone to teachers up and down the country, trying to persuade them to let Queer Up North and Stonewall into their schools.

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Trans people don't lack rights

By Debbie Hayton

The calumny that LGBT people are a risk to children is alive and well, and I don’t want what I write here to give succour to those who perpetuate it. But here’s the thing: the Stonewall of today is not the Stonewall I so admired a decade ago. If I were on the phone to those teachers today, I’d advise them not to have Stonewall in their schools.

The government also appears to have spotted that something is wrong. It has issued guidance prohibiting schools from working with external organisations that “reinforce damaging stereotypes, for instance by suggesting that children might be a different gender based on their personality and interests or the clothes they prefer to wear”. The government doesn’t say which organisations it has in mind, but several established LGBT organisations — including Stonewall — produce materials that would appear to fall foul of the new rules.

The original Stonewall proceeded from a premise which gradually found support across the political spectrum: that the experience of same-sex desire is morally neutral and therefore not a just basis for discrimination. Stonewall’s campaigns to equalise the age of consent, overturn the ban on gays and lesbians in the military, and secure civil partnerships and equal marriage, all gathered social and political support on this basis.

But since beginning to campaign on trans issues in 2015, Stonewall has faced more complex, specialised questions than in its first 26 years, during which it campaigned solely on matters relating to sexual orientation.

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Has trans activism gone too far?

By Douglas Murray

The foundational proposition of modern trans politics is that sex — boundaried, binary, and stubbornly unchangeable — should be replaced with the more malleable concept of ‘gender identity’ — the belief that we all have an innate, irreducible (and unverifiable) sense of our gender, unrelated to biological sex.

The marginalisation of sex in trans activism sits uneasily with the centrality of sex to lesbian and gay activism. I’m a gay man which means I experience sexual desire for male bodies — not for people who ‘identify as’ men (who could be male or female). But the solidarity between LGB and T people has tended to mean more to us than any underlying conceptual frictions; Queer Up North had this solidarity at its heart and trans artists and performers were central to the work we did.

But when Stonewall decided to campaign on trans issues as well as sexual orientation issues, these conceptual frictions had to be resolved into a coherent policy platform. Stonewall’s response to these complexities was to adopt wholly the precepts of trans politics; the de-emphasis of sex and the promotion of innate gender identity. This has led to some contorted positions with damaging real-world effects.

For example, it has led Stonewall to reconfigure homosexual desire. This is not immediately apparent from Stonewall’s glossary, which, for example, describes a lesbian as a woman who is attracted to other women. But the glossary doesn’t offer a definition of ‘woman’ because Stonewall is keen to dodge the implications of its replacement of biological sex with self-reported gender identity — namely that a woman is a person of either sex who ‘identifies’ as a woman.

It follows inexorably that lesbians must now accept that — to use the phrase beloved of trans activists and their woke allies — “some women have penises”. You don’t have to know much about lesbianism to appreciate that the absence of penis is fundamental to the concept. When a group of lesbians protested at London’s Pride parade in 2018, Stonewall showed them no sympathy. This issue is causing distress and anger for many people, including young women just finding their feet in the lesbian community.

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Stop searching for the 'gay gene'

By Julie Bindel

Its new policy platform has also led Stonewall to look both ways on the issue of gender stereotypes. On the one hand, Stonewall produces excellent materials encouraging young people to explore their lives beyond the boundaries of gendered expectations. On the other, its promotion of gender identity reinforces those same gender stereotypes; a biological male who reports having the gender identity ‘woman’ cannot explain the claim without gender stereotypes. This is not a problem within the specific domain of trans politics, but Stonewall now claims that everyone has a gender identity, and therefore everyone identifies, in some way, with gender stereotypes. While Stonewall continues to make this claim it will continue to be on the wrong side of the government’s new schools guidance.

Having adopted such radical, far-reaching new policies, rather than seek to persuade wider society of their value, Stonewall has sought to silence opposition and enforce submission by labelling heretics — such as women who want to retain the sex-based rights secured by the 2010 Equality Act, and lesbians who reject the concept of the ‘female penis’ — as ‘transphobic’, placing them on the same moral level as racists.

A substantial, and increasing, number of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people have had enough of Stonewall’s dogmatism. The founding in 2019 of the LGB Alliance, a grassroots, lesbian-led lobbying group which rejects gender identity, is responding to the demand for alternative thinking.

Stonewall’s brand is powerful — but brands are illusory, and Stonewall’s masks the socially divisive and damaging effects of its current policies. Politicians, schools, NGOs and major corporations routinely subcontract their judgment on LGBT issues to Stonewall, persuaded that whatever Stonewall says is ‘best practice’ must be right. But they should learn to be more cautious, because the new Stonewall is a vastly different organisation from the one which gradually earned their trust.

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Trans people don’t lack rights

Debbie Hayton — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 11:06:06 +0000

Gender recognition is the ultimate political hot potato. Three years after Justine Greening — the then Equalities Minister — announced a public consultation on changes to the 2004 Gender Recognition Act, and two years after the public were finally asked for their views, we are still far from resolution. As the months passed, many assumed that the Government had kicked it into the long grass, if not the primeval forest.

The consultation itself came and went a year later in 2018 amid fervent campaigns by transgender activists eager to allow legal gender changes on demand, and women’s groups concerned that their boundaries would be rendered meaningless as a result. If men can identify as women — for whatever reason they might choose — how can they be kept out? It is naïve to rely on the argument that “men wouldn’t do that, would they?” Spaces such as changing rooms are most often cited, but also at risk are prisons, hospital wards, reserved places on committees and boards, scholarships and, indeed, every sex-based protection.

For the past two years, the hot potato never went cold — on the contrary, it ignited a social media inferno. The furore surrounding JK Rowling — condemned as a transphobe for reclaiming the word woman to describe her sex — is remarkable only because she is a public figure.

The plans leaked to The Sunday Times, and splashed across yesterday’s front page, sparked uproar. Many transgender rights campaigners were horrified. These were not the plans they were looking for. Nancy Kelly, CEO of Stonewall UK described them as “another blow to our community during a difficult time”, citing the huge amount of abuse they believe trans people suffer in their daily lives.

Britain is not a transphobic country

By Debbie Hayton

As a trans person, I take issue with that statement. I very rarely suffer hostility in the UK — there seems to be no a causal link between gender recognition legislation and social attitudes at large. When I am out and about, people couldn’t appear to care less that I am trans, if they even notice, and few would know anything about the rather obscure law under debate.

The plans were not even unexpected. On 22 April, Liz Truss — the minister for Women and Equalities — set out her priorities for the Government Equalities Office. As she closed her statement, she remarked,

“We’ve been doing a lot of work internally, making sure we’re in a position to respond to that consultation and launch what we propose to do on the future of the Gender Recognition Act. We will be in a position to do that by the summer, and there are three very important principles that I will be putting place.

First of all, the protection of single-sex spaces, which is extremely important.

Secondly making sure that transgender adults are free to live their lives as they wish without fear of persecution, whilst maintaining the proper checks and balances in the system.

Finally, which is not a direct issue concerning the Gender Recognition Act, but is relevant, making sure that the under-18s are protected from decisions that they could make, that are irreversible in the future. I believe strongly that adults should have the freedom to lead their lives as they see fit, but I think it’s very important that while people are still developing their decision-making capabilities that we protect them from making those irreversible decisions.”

The Sunday Times report suggests that the Government plans to adopt these priorities, and move them forward through guidance rather than fresh legislation.

First, there seems to be no appetite to change the mechanism for legal gender recognition. Anyone wishing to change their legal gender will still need to produce two medical reports to support their application. But a proposed crackdown on “quack” doctors would close the loophole by which disreputable medics could write what the patient wanted them to write. Otherwise gender recognition would still be on demand, albeit on payment of an extra fee for sympathetic medical reports.

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Has trans activism gone too far?

By Douglas Murray

Second, women’s “safe spaces” will be safeguarded. Existing legislation — the Equality Act 2010 — was cited, so no change there either. What has been lacking is clear and unambiguous guidance over when women can maintain spaces and services according to their sex. Hitherto, there has been rather too much assumption and too little clarity. The current jargon — “a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim” — is easier said than applied. In July 2018, the Equality and Human Rights Commission set out to clarify the interplay between different pieces of legislation, but acknowledged that it was a complex area of law, and highlighted the need for further conversation.

The specific mention of toilets has been the lightning rod for concerns. It will never be workable to rigidly police who uses which toilet, but clearer guidelines are needed to empower women to challenge people who they think should not be in the women’s. Though rather than argue over who can have access and who should be excluded, let’s be truly progressive and campaign for additional unisex facilities for anyone who does not want to share communal facilities with their own sex. Good practice there is good practice for all, and not just those who might identify as non-binary. Long before I transitioned, I found them a godsend when out with my young daughter.

Third — almost as an afterthought — came a proposed ban on gay conversion therapy, mentioning “some church groups”.

Where does this leave transgender people? Some of my fellow transgender campaigners are in no doubt. Helen Belcher, the Liberal Democrat candidate for Chippenham in 2017 and 2019 urged us all to write to our MPs:

“Start writing today, and don’t stop until they drop this awful, discriminatory position”

while the journalist Paris Lees suggested that

“trans people are scared and upset about our rights being rolled back.”

But I think differently. The problems we face as trans people are not based on a lack of rights, but a lack of confidence. Proceeding, as we have been, on assumption rather than statute, trans people have been taking and women have been yielding. That cannot go on indefinitely. Tensions have been rising — witness the toxicity of social media — and emotions are running ever higher.

A boy in a dress is just a boy in a dress

By Debbie Hayton

We desperately need clarity, and these proposals are only a start. While self-identification of gender is off the table at Westminster, it remains a policy objective in Scotland. Dr Kath Murray of the policy collective MurrayBlackburnMackenzie tells me:

“The draft Scottish Bill would also allow people living elsewhere in the UK but born in Scotland to apply for a GRC under Scottish law, which means that change here has a potential impact outside Scotland.”

But across society organisations and institutions have already been captured. In an apparent rush to get ahead of the law, Marks and Spencer allow shoppers to use whichever changing rooms they wish, while Girlguiding UK allow male children to share tents and showers with female children. In business, Pips Bunce — a cross-dressing “gender fluid” man — won a place on the FT list of Top 100 Women in Business. While we should defend Bunce’s right of gender expression, it’s not progressive to displace a woman from a scheme to promote women. This all needs to stop. It is an affront to women and children.

It was notable that Truss referred to children in her statement, citing the dangers of inappropriate choices being offered. The Sunday Times did not elaborate on the proposed ban on gay conversion therapy. However, clinicians at the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) — England’s only NHS gender clinic for children — have previously expressed concerns that “some openly homophobic parents sought transition for their children because they were gay”. If dogmatic churches might try to “pray away the gay”, this surely is an abhorrent attempt to “trans away the gay”.

In the short term, the future looks uncertain for trans people. Until the Government publishes its plans — reportedly at the end of July — speculation will be rife. But this is a debate we need to enter. Belcher is right: we should write to our MPs. But not to complain; we need to engage constructively with other groups, and campaign for long-term solutions that accommodate us in society without compromising the rights of women and children. Then we really will be able to live our best lives with confidence and security.

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Why J.K. Rowling had to be denounced

Douglas Murray — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 11:07:15 +0000

With this exciting year almost at the half-way point, it is reasonably safe to conclude that coronavirus has not killed off the culture wars after all. Indeed, with Covid-19 still taking hundreds of lives in Britain each week, the political madness of our age has flared up like never before, a whirlwind that howls afresh each day, the crowds making themselves more and more demented at a faster and faster rate.

We are now at the stage where people are expected to denounce friends or, in the case of J.K. Rowling, the woman who made their careers and to whom they owe everything. The author needs no introduction, but perhaps a lucky few among you have managed to miss our howling culture wars. If so, a summary: where Rowling was once universally lauded for her writing, today an element of the online public purports to believe that the Harry Potter author is an evil bigot.

This is because on that issue of minimal importance but maximal rage – the Trans debate – Rowling has taken the same view that the majority of the British public holds. Which is that while trans people should be afforded the same rights and dignity as everybody else, they do not have the right to redefine biological reality. Specifically, in the case of Rowling and many others, they do not have the right to redefine what a woman is.

Last week the author took exception to the use of the phrase “people who menstruate” in a news report — the headline writer clearly trying to get around having to use the increasingly triggering word “woman”. As Rowling wittily put it:

‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?

Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate https://t.co/cVpZxG7gaA

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 6, 2020

This brought the ire of trans Twitter down upon her. That whole army of people who used to be men who tell women to shut up, and the people who think they are helping trans people by pretending that biological sex doesn’t exist and that the clownfish is a suggestive comparison for the biological make-up of human beings.

So after a few days of abuse, Rowling published a long article on her website explaining her position, a deeply personal, moving and reflective piece from the heart. So of course people who hadn’t read it continued in their campaign to make the creator of the Potterverse into a persona non grata in what used to be called polite society.

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All of this is an average week in the cesspool of Twitter. But the most interesting aspect of the rage against Rowling is not the anonymous trolls and freakishly unemployable individuals who spend their days abusing famous writers on social media: it is the fact that all week the Rowling story has been whipped along by the pronouncements of people who to a greater or lesser degree owe their careers to J.K. Rowling.

The first to break was Daniel Radcliffe. Of course, Daniel Radcliffe owes everything to Rowling. He isn’t an especially accomplished actor, even after all these years of practice. He isn’t noticeably good-looking either, or in any other way naturally fitted for the screen. His superstar career has come about because, at the age of 10, the director of the first Harry Potter film spotted him and thought he was perfect for the role.

So you would have thought that a certain amount of solidarity or even simple gratitude might be in order. But no. On Monday, Radcliffe issued a statement through a Trans charity called The Trevor Project denouncing the woman who made his career. “While Jo is unquestionably responsible for the course my life has taken,” he stated: “as someone who has been honored to work with and continues to contribute to The Trevor Project for the last decade, and just as a human being, I feel compelled to say something at this moment.”

“As a human being.” Unlike Rowling, obviously.

Radcliffe went on to spout the usual dogma, declaring that “Transgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases etc etc…” Just to further make clear where he stood, he even had the audacity to address some of Rowling’s readers. “To all the people who now feel that their experience of the books has been tarnished or diminished, I am deeply sorry for the pain these comments have caused you.”

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As Radcliffe must have expected, this led to worldwide headlines, all coincidentally portraying him in the best possible light. “Daniel Radcliffe speaks out” and “Daniel Radcliffe calls out JK Rowling’s anti-trans comments” were two typical headlines. All of these cast both actor and author in a very specific light — Rowling had done something terrible, while Radcliffe was boldly, heroically and one might also add bravely, calling her out.

Next up was Eddie Redmayne, who played some less-memorable character in the interminable Fantastical Beasts movies, also based on Rowling’s work. Perhaps Redmayne felt especially compelled to speak up because he had previously pretended to be a trans person onscreen in The Danish Girl. A movie from just five years ago that would undoubtedly now lead to questions about why a cis male should presume to approximate the feelings of a trans person by playing one on screen. Anyhow, Redmayne, too, felt condemned to criticise Rowling, and in a statement issued to Variety magazine he said:

“Respect for transgender people remains a cultural imperative, and over the years I have been trying to constantly educate myself. This is an ongoing process. As someone who has worked with both J.K. Rowling and members of the trans community, I wanted to make it absolutely clear where I stand. I disagree with Jo’s comments. Trans women are women, trans men are men and non-binary identities are valid.”

Like Radcliffe, Redmayne was rewarded with headlines describing him as ‘speaking out’ and the like. So brave. Once again the media portrayed him as being on the right side against an unspeakable position taken by his elder.

Finally, out came Emma Watson, who like Radcliffe owes her career to Rowling. Since becoming known as Hermione in the Harry Potter movies, Watson has often used her platform to advocate for all the correct causes of the hour. And so perhaps it was inevitable that she should condemn Rowling for her views — but the framing of Rowling was instructive.

“Trans people are who they say they are,” she wrote, making no mention of Rowling’s own revealed traumas: “and deserve to live their lives without being constantly questioned or told they aren’t what they say they are.”

By now it was not just that Watson, Remayne and Radcliffe had ‘called out’ and ‘spoken up’ about Rowling’s views. They had spoken up — as reporter after reporter put it – against Rowling’s ‘controversial’ views. It is a very interesting thing this modern use of the word ‘controversial’, often and indeed usually put in front of a person who holds views which are in absolutely no way controversial.

In fact what polling there is on trans issues suggests that while it is ‘controversial’ to believe that a person who was born a man is exactly the same as a woman, it is not remotely controversial to believe (as Rowling does) that while they are deserving of exactly the same rights and respect as everyone else, trans women are not the exact same thing as biological women. So the commonly held view is the ‘controversial’ one, while the ideas of a small number of campaigners are held up as the only acceptable and non-controversial opinion to hold.

Because of some of the personal revelations made by Rowling in the last week, not least about her own experience as a domestic abuse survivor, there has been a tiny amount of pushback against the three actors who have benefited so much from the work of J.K. Rowling. But the most important lesson has been entirely missed.

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None of the three needed to say anything. None of them needed to release a statement. None of them needed to string the story along for another couple of days by denouncing the author in succession. All will doubtless claim that they felt that they needed to in some way, and this claim will most often be backed up — in private — by a plea that they were coming under enormous pressure of some kind.

It is possible that they were. That some of the unbelievably demented activists who operate in this area made the actors feel that their silence was complicity, to use one of the Stalinist phrases which has embedded itself in our culture. But here is the thing — they didn’t need to say anything. They could have remained beautifully silent, as Redmayne has in the past admirably suggested that actors should on political topics. But they didn’t.

As individuals, we all have friends who have opinions great or small with which we are in disagreement. Yet a civilised person does not feel the urge to publicly call out, shame or in any other way have it out with somebody who is a friend or who has been good to you. At the least you will shrug. At the most you might pick up the phone and speak to the person. But the modern instinct is not to do this; the modern instinct is to go nuclear and denounce them in public. It is one of the most unhealthy habits in an age which needs less of them.

I suppose we should be grateful that, at the time of writing, at least the Weasleys haven’t kicked off.

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Can science ever debate trans issues?

Jesse Singal — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 23:00:15 +0000

Over the last few years, there’s been an explosion of awareness about the condition known as gender dysphoria — a sense of deep, painful discomfort with one’s biological sex, the gender associated with it, or both. Gender dysphoria can cause devastating anguish when the person suffering from it lacks access to treatment. As I put it in an Atlantic article from a couple of years ago, it has been described by some people who have it as “a weight, a buzzing, an unavoidable source of rumination and worry”.

For some people with gender dysphoria, simply changing their hair, clothes, and other aspects of their appearance to present in a more stereotypically male or female or androgynous manner is enough to bring relief; for others, only hormones, surgery or both will suffice. But the only treatment for severe, persistent gender dysphoria for which there’s any real evidence is transition.

While the LGBT community has ever-shifting labels that mean different things at different times, it’s safe to say that most people who identify as transgender have or had gender dysphoria, and transitioned in part as an attempt to alleviate it.

Despite the significant gains made by the trans rights movement in recent years, the scientific underpinnings of gender dysphoria and its treatment are still almost completely unknown. Even the available evidence for the efficacy of hormones is only, according to a 2010 systematic review, “very low quality.” As the British Journal of Medicine pointed out on its website in 2019, drawing on two more recent systematic reviews of youth GD treatment, “There are significant problems with how the evidence for Gender-affirming cross-sex hormone has been collected and analysed that prevents definitive conclusions to be drawn.”

Furthermore, there are also some increasingly-heated culture wars going on in this area that hinge a great deal on certain scientific questions no one knows the answer to: How concerned should we be about what appears to be a growing number of ‘detransitioners’ — that is, people who transition their gender and then transition back? How common is detransition in the U.S. or the U.K.? How often do kids with GD experience ‘desistance,’ or their GD simply abating in time?

(Desistance is itself an immensely controversial and complicated discussion, and some people wrongly claim it is quite rare — I went deep into the weeds here and here if you’re curious about what the literature on it does and doesn’t say.)

Given all this uncertainty, and given the stakes for people trying to better understand their own struggles with GD, it seems like a particularly important time for the scientific study of this subject to operate in a transparent, careful manner.

Instead, it is becoming more and more difficult for researchers to study this subject without accidentally stepping on certain political landmines — landmines that are understandable given some of the dark history associated with the scientific establishment’s treatment of gender nonconforming people, but which really are hindering scientific progress.

And an incident that unfolded this spring at a neuroscience journal shows just how bad things are getting. It suggested that only a very particular, very narrow storyline is allowed — and if you deviate from it, you risk professional and reputational damage. In the long run, this sort of science-by-petition, in which activists who can make a loud enough racket can get research retracted that wouldn’t be retracted otherwise, is exceptionally harmful.

Back in December, the journal eNeuro published a paper entitled “A New Theory of Gender Dysphoria Incorporating the Distress, Social Behavioral, and Body-Ownership Networks.” The paper was tagged as “Theory/New Concepts,” and it indeed challenged a common understanding of gender dysphoria.

That understanding holds that, to oversimplify somewhat, gender dysphoria arises from having the body of a male but the brain of a female (or vice-versa). While far from dispositive, some past studies have suggested that transgender individuals with gender dysphoria have brains more like the sex they identify with than their natal sex. (Some of these studies were performed posthumously on trans people who had been on hormones, raising the possibility that the hormones caused the observed brain differences.)

Not so fast, argued the author of the eNeuro article. Stephen Gliske, a researcher who trained as a physicist but who gained sufficient expertise in neuroscience to be hired as a research assistant professor in the University of Michigan Medical School’s department of neurology, posited a new theory questioning “the relevance of cerebral sexual dimorphism in regard to gender dysphoria”.

Instead, he argued that “in individuals with gender dysphoria, the aspects of chronic distress, gender atypical behavior, and incongruence between perception of gender identity and external primary sex characteristics are all directly related to functional differences in associated brain networks.”

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Almost immediately, Gliske’s paper was denounced by a group of researchers and activists who accused it of peddling dangerous ideas about trans people. Unfortunately, eNeuro did not respond with agility. Over a disastrous, opaque, flawed process that took months to unfold, the journal first demanded Gliske choose between cutting one section of the paper and having it retracted. After he agreed to the cut, the journal put an edited version online. Then, when academics again complained, this time launching a Change.org petition, the journal launched yet another round of reviews and eventually retracted the paper.

Before explaining the way things spiraled out of hand, it’s important to acknowledge that the initial critique of Gliske’s paper had some merit to it. The first version contained a section entitled “Implications for clinical practice”. In it, Gliske argued that “The use of gender reassignment as a therapy is sometimes motivated on the assumption that the distress is due to the individuals having a brain sex different than their gender assigned at birth and that the desire to change genders is based on a correct sense of true gender.”

If, as Gliske’s own theory suggested, this is false, it could call into question such treatments, he argued. “Our new theory furthers the discussion regarding biologically-based treatments independent of gender identity affirmation that might address distress and body ownership in individuals with gender dysphoria.” That is, “treatments based on our new theory could instead involve targeting the distress and/or body ownership networks, perhaps specifically seeking to restore a sense of ownership over body parts perceived as incongruous.”

Anyone even faintly aware of the politics surrounding trans rights will understand why this was an ill-advised passage. While the present state of the evidence that transition works is not as sturdy as it could be, and some people with gender dysphoria are actively hoping for other options, it is still the case that transition is the only real game in town at the moment, and that access to it feels like a life-and-death matter for many trans people. Moreover, there’s also a dark history of attempts to biologically alter LGBT people to ‘fix’ them.

It’s not unreasonable, then, that a trans person, or someone who simply cares about them, might be alarmed reading a paper that raises, without much context, the possibility of “biologically-based treatments independent of gender identity affirmation that might address distress and body ownership in individuals with gender dysphoria”.

On 7 December, with the article up on eNeuro’s website in a near-final, post-peer-review form, the journal’s editor-in-chief, Christophe Bernard, a French neuroscientist, emailed Gliske. After laying out some of the concerns raised about the paper, Bernard wrote, “We therefore ask you to remove the Implications for Clinical Practice section, as well as any other reference to clinical implications throughout the article, abstract, and Significance Statement, before final publication. These changes will be noted to journal readers with a formal published notice. … If you decline to make these changes, the Editorial Board will move to retract your article on the grounds that the clinical implications are not supported by the available data.”

Whether or not this critique was well-grounded (and, again, I believe it was, although the bit about the “available data” didn’t make much sense given that Gliske was positing a new theory) this is an unusual situation. It isn’t common for the author of a paper that has already gone through the peer-review process to be told he or she has to delete one particular section or choose to have the entire paper retracted. But what came next was even stranger.

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Some of the activists criticizing the paper were not mollified by the revisions made to it. Instead, a group of them led by Troy A. Roepke of Rutgers University, launched a Change.org petition demanding not only retraction of the paper, but revisions to eNeuro’s editorial process which would ensure that “at least one reviewer should come from the community directly impacted by these types of papers to ensure that language and intent are not dangerous, deleterious, or damning”.

The petition distorts and misrepresents the contents of the paper in basic ways. After claiming, without any evidence, that “the clear intent of the paper was to do harm to the transgender community, one of the most vulnerable communities across the globe” (bolding in the original), it argues that there is a “basic assumption that transgender people are a deleterious deviation with a disordered network of brain regions which pervades the entire manuscript”.

But the paper isn’t about, and makes no moral claims of any sort, about transgender people — it’s about the neurological origins of gender dysphoria. It doesn’t take a particularly sophisticated grounding in philosophy to understand that whether GD is the result of one brain theory versus another doesn’t, on its own, prove anything about the moral status or worth of people with gender dysphoria.

The most vicious homophobic bigots, after all, are just as enthusiastic about gay-bashing whether the theory is that homosexuality is genetic (in which case the responsible genes need to be wiped out), or the result of corrupt cultural influences (in which the responsible influences need to be wiped out). This is just a wild moral leap on the part of the petitioners, and it’s surprising that the journal would pay any mind to such a confused and inflammatory petition.

But not only did the journal heed this group’s input, it let Roepke and eight coauthors pen a response that was published on the eNeuro website alongside the original article. That response is just as strange as the petition, exhibiting a lack of familiarity with the evidence base for treating gender dysphoria, and with the specific arguments of Gliske’s paper. For example, the authors accuse Gliske of making claims which conflict with existing empirical observations about gender-affirming intervention, ignoring the fact that he quite specifically states that treatment can alleviate distress — and they themselves cite a paper pointing out the weakness of the evidence base for hormones.

It would have been strange enough for the eNeuro editors to give so much oxygen to Roepke’s bad-faith petition and response. But it’s what happened next where this story tips over from ‘strange’ into ‘bizarre’ — for now Gliske received an email from eNeuro informing him that, actually, the paper was being retracted.

The editors’ reasoning is explained in a ‘synthesis statement’ which, again, contains many odd claims that don’t quite line up with the paper that was actually published. It often reads as though the editors simply threw as many complaints at the wall as they could — many of them picayune and easily debunked by reading the paper or the editorial comments sent to Gliske during the editing process — in an attempt to make the paper seem extremely sloppy.

At one point, for example, the authors note that Gliske used the word transsexual, and that this, along with some other terms in the paper, are “no longer adequate terms to be used and should be adjusted for a more respectful language”. But in the body of the paper itself there is a single use of this term: “I also use the term ‘transgender’ throughout this manuscript, though I recognize that some references instead use the word transsexual to refer to the same concept.” So his only use of this term is to explain that he is not going to use it, and to explain why it appears in the citations (transsexual is simply the older term for “being trans,” and is seen by some trans people as outdated or offensive, while others embrace it).

Similarly, the synthesis statement asks: “[W]hat exactly is the author trying to say in the paragraph noting that trans people have been found to have elevated presence of autistic traits within relation to their theory?”

But in an exchange still visible on the eNeuro site (archive), a reviewer recommended that Gliske add a mention of autism to the section on common gender-dysphoria comorbidities — not a surprise given the well-established link between the two conditions. Again, this is simply strange: in a public statement, the journal’s editors criticised the author of a paper for making an editorial decision the journal itself asked him to make.

But all these odd and nitpicky complaints could be seen as moot, because the reviewers give away the game in a sentence that clearly reveals their gripe is political, not scientific:”[T]he author appears disrespectful to the community because he/she does not seem to believe that a transgender person’s statement of belonging to one or the other gender is taken at face value and believed to be true.”

This is worth exploring. The authors of the synthesis statement don’t bother explaining what “belonging to one or the other gender” could possibly mean in a neuroscience context. Gliske’s paper has no bearing on the question of whether a trans person is ‘really’ a woman or a man (or neither in the case of a nonbinary person), because of course no theory of gender dysphoria could, on its own, settle such a philosophical and sociological issue.

His paper, again, is simply an attempt to posit a new theory about gender dysphoria. The only neuroscience-related explanation of this phrase which could apply here is something like “Gliske does not seem to believe that a transgender man/woman has a male/female brain”. But that, of course, is exactly the theory he is arguing against! If this is actually what his critics intended to mean, they are claiming that it “appears disrespectful” to posit that the brainsex theory of gender dysphoria is false.

This would be news to many gender dysphoric people. There is, of course, a vast diversity of opinion about what causes gender dysphoria among those who have or had the condition. There are desisters, who appear to outgrow the condition over time, usually in their younger years — they, of course, do not think that they were “trapped in the wrong body,” because their GD didn’t turn out to be permanent.

Detransitioners, meanwhile, don’t tend to believe in the brainsex theory either. While some destransition because they lack the money or support to continue living as their felt gender, others realize they simply weren’t really trans. A subset of detransitioners continue to have gender dysphoria, but do not believe the solution is to transition, because it didn’t work for them — in fact, when some detransitioners in this category tried to hold panels at a trans health conference, one on detransitioning and one on alternate treatments for GD, those panels were abruptly cancelled due to the outcry of activists

Many happily transitioned people, too, believe that whatever GD is, it’s more complicated than having one ‘type’ of body and the other ‘type’ of brain, or the closely related idea of having an innate and immutable ‘gender identity’: Trans writers ranging from Andrea Long Chu to Natalie Reed to Natalie Wynn (aka Contrapoints) to various ‘gender-critical’ trans women have all critiqued these ideas, which they tend to view as oversimplifications which don’t capture the full texture of the trans experience.

It makes no sense, then, to view theories of gender dysphoria as being off-limits if they tell a different story than brainsex-mismatch. To do so is to ignore the views of many, if not most, people with gender dysphoria. It’s also completely unscientific: When you don’t know much about what causes a phenomenon, you can’t draw strict boundaries about what sorts of explanations will be deemed worth exploring versus rejected out of hand.

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This episode bears certain noteworthy similarities to what happened to Lisa Littman, the M.D. who in 2018 published a PLOS One paper on “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” or the very young and mostly unexplored theory that in some cases young people (usually teenage girls) might develop gender dysphoria and/or a transgender identity quite suddenly as a result of peer influence or social media. (For what it’s worth, in my own reporting I have certainly come across kids who fit that bill, but I’m careful not to posit this as a definite explanation in any particular case because so little is known about ROGD and it could be harmful for parents to jump to this conclusion regarding a newly ‘out’ child.)

Like Gliske, Littman was proposing a new theory that was viewed as threatening by some activists (they believe that the concept of ROGD is a means of ‘invalidating’ the claims of trans youth). Like Gliske, she dealt with a wave of criticism within and beyond the academy that often seemed geared at producing a high quantity of claims about her research rather than high-quality ones.

And like Gliske, she had to deal with institutions caving in to activists, and with a bruising post-peer-review re-review clearly designed to appease those activists: Brown University retracted the press release announcing the study and issued a bizarre ‘apology’ without noting anything in the paper that had been wrong, and PLOS One issued a ‘correction’ consisting of many cosmetic updates and then acknowledged to me that there had been no errors in the paper. (I had never heard of a paper being ‘corrected’ when there weren’t any errors.)

Littman subsequently published a paper showing that just about every critique issued at her paper in an attempt to invalidate it could also be applied to papers on trans youth that had garnered no complaints from activists, probably because those papers didn’t make any politically threatening claims.

“There is a clear double standard,” she told me in an email. “Research articles that do not adhere to the gender-identity affirming narrative are called out as unacceptable, even when their methods are consistent with those cited to support the use of the gender-identity affirming model of care. It appears as if groups are engaging in motivated reasoning — ‘I don’t want this research to be true, so I will aggressively question every single attribute of the work, even if I’m comfortable with those same attributes in research articles that support my view.’ Unfortunately, many people are misusing the terms ‘biased,’ ‘methodologically flawed,’ and ‘debunked’ when they really mean ‘challenges my assumptions,’ ‘comes to a different conclusion than me,’ and ‘has known limitations.’”

Littman, to her credit, hasn’t been deterred — she’s continuing to research this subject, and recently solicited the accounts of individuals who have desisted or detransitioned.

Maybe Stephen Gliske’s paper was completely off-base. Maybe it’s on the right track. Maybe it’s somewhere in between. Now that it’s been retracted, though, a message has been sent, loud and clear: Don’t try to look into this theory. That chilling effect is far more dangerous than any individual retraction or faux ‘correction’. In the long run, it will cut off entire avenues of research that could help lead us to better understand a very important and vexing subject.

Think about what the gender dysphoria research scene must look like at the moment to genuinely inquisitive, compassionate, brilliant 25-year-old neuroscientists, psychologists and psychiatrists-in-training? What possible reason would they have to want to attack this fascinating subject with any of the vigor and intellect they’d apply to other, less controversial subjects? All the incentives point in the opposite direction: Run far from here.

It’s heartbreaking to think of all the knowledge that will be lost as a result — and all the people who will suffer more than they needed to because of the way scientific inquiry was wrongly crimped.

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Britain is not a transphobic country

Debbie Hayton — Thu, 12 Mar 2020 00:01:41 +0000

The last day of March marks the International Transgender Day of Visibility, which must be in contention for most redundant event in the calendar. Some readers might be of the opinion that a few days of transgender invisibility might be more timely.

As a transgender person, I am tempted to agree. When I transitioned eight years ago the goal was to assimilate back into society, and with the minimum of fuss. Occasional stories did reach the press but, while there was passing interest, they were never high up the news agenda.

While the increased visibility cannot be denied, some people are now claiming that transphobia is taking over the nation. In an astonishing opinion piece for the New York Times earlier this week, Juliet Jacques announced that Transphobia is Everywhere in Britain.

Collins Dictionary defines transphobia as “a fear or hatred of transgender people”, so — if Jacques is correct — this is serious. Are there really hordes of people who are either fleeing from me in terror or on a warpath to my door?

I don’t think so. Certainly it is not my experience, nor is it the experience of my transgender friends. I earn a living as a teacher and go about my life much as I always did. Many things can keep me awake at night, but transphobia is not one of them.

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While vociferous transgender activists repeat endlessly their demand for “trans rights now”, it’s much less clear what rights we lack. The 2010 Equality Act established gender reassignment as a protected characteristic to defend us against harassment and discrimination. Meanwhile, transphobia is recognised as an aggravating factor in hate crime legislation. We can readily change sex markers on passports, driving licences and other documents. Even the sex recorded on our birth certificates can be amended — or falsified depending on your point of view — if we can demonstrate evidence of need. What more do we want?

Yes, transgender healthcare is buckling under the strain following unprecedented increased demand, and we suffer appalling delays for specialist medical treatment. Scope also remains to further develop additional “third spaces” for trans people, and anyone else who doesn’t want to share with their own sex. However, my fellow citizens do not appear to fear me or hate me because I am transgender.

Some perspective is needed here. Only 12 years ago, a transgender friend was dismissed from her job as an assistant headteacher because she proposed to transition. Her school told her that should she come to work in female attire, she would be escorted straight off the premises. Such outrageous transphobia is no longer permissible or acceptable. Society has been transformed.

So what is this transphobia that Jacques is complaining about? She is not alone; seeking out transphobia in order to moan about it seems to be a key part of transgender activism.

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On Monday evening, I was at an epicentre of this so-called transphobic hate: a rally hosted by the Labour Women’s Declaration in support of Woman’s Place UK and the LGB Alliance. Those two organisations were recently singled out by the egregious Labour Campaign for Trans Rights (LCTR) as trans-exclusionist hate groups. Strong words — and a total misrepresentation of reality.

I not only attended that rally — held in a North Kensington social club — I spoke from the platform. Alongside me were those who the LCTR would no doubt condemn as premier league transphobes.

Kiri Tunks, a founder of Woman’s Place UK, reiterated her astonishment at the controversy Woman’s Place has generated. Their campaign to uphold women’s sex-based rights, as enshrined in UK Law, and defend women’s right to be heard, has been twisted out of all recognition in the minds of their opponents. From the LGB Alliance, Bev Jackson described the worst attack on lesbian rights in her lifetime. As sex and gender have been conflated and confused, 40% of people on some lesbian dating sites now have male bodies. She was clear: sex is biology; gender is stereotypes. As a scientist I agree wholeheartedly.

The barrister and former firefighter Lucy Masoud and UnHerd’s Paul Embery called out those leading Labour Party politicians who had signed the LCTR pledges. Masoud described it as “a descent into political lunacy”, but it is an entrenched position in the party. Lachlan Stuart — former adviser to Jeremy Corbyn — explained how doors were closed to him in 2018 when he voiced his concerns about the qualifying criteria for all-women shortlists.

Julie Bindel then let rip. The old-style sexism she had grown up with in the 1970s was preferable to this insidious misogyny dressed up as progress. Transgender ideology, she declared, was men’s rights activism. By now my erasure should have been complete but instead I listened intently as Professor Selina Todd — no platformed recently at Oxford University for alleged transphobery — told the packed hall that not signing the LCTR pledges and silence was not good enough, and if the Labour Party disappeared down a rabbit hole of misogyny then the Labour movement will go forwards without them.

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If this was the transphobia that Jacques had in mind, trans people need not be concerned. Trans people in the hall were welcomed warmly and treated with dignity and respect. Trans rights are human rights and they were safe in that meeting.

Unfortunately, the sense of solidarity was not replicated outside the building. Throughout the evening a noisy and intimidating group of protesters repeated their catechism ad nauseum, trans women are real women (spoiler: we are not, we are a different sex) and trans men are real men. But after shrieking about terfs on their turf, they exposed their vacuous ideology and political naivety when they ignited smoke bombs outside the building, just two hundred metres from the shocking sight of Grenfell Tower. As smoke entered the room, the tension and fear was palpable. Memories are still raw in this neighbourhood: it most certainly was not their turf.

When I engaged with the demonstrators after the meeting I was met with fear and animosity. There certainly is transphobia in society — we must not be naïve about that — but it wasn’t found in that meeting, it was outside in the darkness. Maybe the frenzied concern that Britain is being consumed by transphobia is a projection of their inner fears?

The view from the New York Times that “Transphobia is everywhere in Britain” is not just nonsense. It deflects us from the work that we should be focusing on. Trans rights are not secure: we suffer appalling delays for specialist NHS treatment, and we would be foolish to think that bigotry and discrimination were behind us. But we are stronger when we find common cause with other groups that face similar opposition, namely women and LGB people; and from a platform inside a North Kensington social club we made that clear.

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The inconvenient truth about transwomen

Debbie Hayton — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 00:01:44 +0000

Fast forwards to 2015 and attention in the UK was turning towards our membership of the EU. However, it was the Council of Europe — the organisation that we are not leaving — that drove the agenda in Europe when it passed Resolution 2048 and called on all member states to enshrine gender identity in national law, and thereby displace biological sex. Without the democratic scrutiny that surrounded prime ministerial succession and Brexit, Resolution 2048 shook the very foundations of human society — what it means to be a man or a woman.

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But this matters for more than Scotland. Fourteen years after Yogyakarta the policy juggernaut has paused in the UK, but it has not gone away. The pressure from transgender activists is incessant.

Women, who lose control of their own boundaries. If any male person can declare themselves to be a female person, those boundaries become meaningless. While few men would call themselves women just to access women’s spaces, those that would are the reason those boundaries are needed.
Children, who are told that they can choose their gender and — if they believe their body to be wrong — may end up railroaded into medical and surgical interventions. Children young enough to believe in the tooth fairy are not old enough to be put on a path that can lead to infertility, loss of sexual function, and medication for life.
Trans people who risk losing the goodwill we rely on. Attempts to change the law to our advantage by policing the words — and even the thoughts — of others will not end well for us. If the Scottish Government doesn’t see the problem, others will and those people may find popular support and rebuild society in a way that is genuinely unkind to us.

Consultations are not referenda. They are opportunities for people to pass on their wisdom and experience to inform decisions made by policy makers.

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Of course biological sex exists

By Tom Chivers

Meanwhile, 14 years after Yogyakarta, policymakers across the world will be watching Scotland weather the storm.

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Has trans orthodoxy conquered the world?

Madeleine Kearns — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 00:05:24 +0000

Last year, many were caught in the crossfire of the transgender wars. Maya Forstater, a researcher and writer, was forced out of her job. J.K. Rowling, beloved children’s author, was attacked as a bigot. Debbie Hayton, a transsexual and science teacher, faces a ban from a union committee. And why? Because each of them, either directly or indirectly, dared to challenge a popular superstition. One that is not going away.

Today, “gender identity” is used, often unthinkingly, to refer to an inner sense of being male, female or neither that every person supposedly has. “Transgenderism”, meanwhile, is used to refer to a person whose “gender identity” (begging the question) puts him or her at odds with the sexed body that he or she was supposedly “assigned”. Replete with impenetrable jargon, this transgender theory is poorly understood and highly contentious, both inside and outside of the medical profession.

As Helen Joyce explains in her meticulously researched essay for Quillette, theories about “gender identity” can be traced back to “two lines of thinking that originated in America in the 1950s and [were] fused into a single, dominant narrative half a century later”. First, Robert Stoller, an American psychoanalyst, coined the phrase “gender identity.” As well as transsexualism, Stoller wrote enthusiastically about “consensual sadomasochism”, pornography, perversion (which he didn’t believe in), and men achieving an erection during “the height [of] the female experience”, or transvestitism.

Stoller’s ideas about gender identity were further popularised by John Money, a psychologist who proposed a new taxonomy called “fuckology”, a term which proved less catchy than gender identity. Having helped set up the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins University, Money then conducted a famous experiment on twin boys, which he left to other people to reveal as a disaster.

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By Debbie Hayton

In this experimental study, Money advised the parents of twin boys, Bruce and Brian Reimer, to raise Bruce as a girl (called Brenda) after his penis had been damaged by a botched circumcision procedure in infancy. This brought Money international acclaim. However, when researchers tracked the Reimers down, decades later, it turned out that “Brenda” had been miserable under Money’s treatment and had reverted to a male identity in adolescence. After a lifetime of suffering from depression, both twins killed themselves. Before their deaths, the brothers maintained that Money had ruined their childhood; the supporting evidence for which has been well-documented by journalist John Colapinto in his investigative book, As Nature Made Him.

Paul McHugh MD, the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who was also active in debunking the false memory craze, told me: “Since the 1970s, I have listened to many people such as John Money explaining this concept [gender identity] but most of them are working on a definition, not of something clear and coherent, but an idea that will permit them to do what they want with patients.”

McHugh is not the only person with doubts. Ray Blanchard, a sexologist, and much-cited expert on transsexualism, told me that gender identity is a redundant term when applied to those of us who are not uncomfortable with our natal sex:

“It’s only at very unusual moments that a normal man or woman has a conscious awareness of ‘I’m a woman’ or ‘I’m a man,’ and this is often a highly emotional situation. . . The concept of cross-gender identity is really not a normal gender identity which has found itself lodged in the wrong body. Cross-gender identity is a constant preoccupation with, and unhappiness about, the individual’s gender. So, I guess you could say I believe in cross-gender identity, but I don’t much believe in gender identity.”

Of course, the Reimer tragedy could have been an opportunity to dispassionately examine the concept of “gender identity”. But psychologists, journalists and academics have overwhelmingly gone in the other direction, retroactively redefining “gender identity” rather than learning lessons from its ugly past.

When reminded of the Reimer tragedy, transgender activists suggest that the problem was that Bruce Reimer was really “cisgender” (newspeak for a person at ease with his natal sex; or a “normal man or woman”, per Blanchard). But such people are overlooking the more obvious fact that Bruce Reimer was a boy who was told repeatedly from his authority figures that he was a girl, as well as the more credible argument that misinforming a child about his basic biology can be psychologically damaging.

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Of course biological sex exists

By Tom Chivers

In his essay Science as Falsification, the philosopher Karl Popper suggested some criteria for the scientific character or status of a theory, and how we might tell science apart from pseudo-science. He warned of grand theories offering “explanatory” solutions to complex (and sometimes unrelated) issues, writing:

“Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers — for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status.”

The distress and desire to change one’s sex is a highly complex mental disorder, the root causes of which vary widely from person to person. In 1994, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) defined this condition as “gender identity disorder”. Then, in 2013, under further pressure from activists, as “gender dysphoria”. The latter is how the condition is listed in the most current edition of the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

But responding to activist pressure, the World Health Organization has recently indicated that they no longer consider “gender identity disorder” to be a “mental health condition”. This is quite a conundrum. If such feelings aren’t a problem, then why do trans people need chemical and surgical treatments at all? And if sex-change treatments are purely cosmetic, then why should British taxpayers (or American insurance providers) pay for them?

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There are no good answers to these questions, no way out of the gnarled web of contradiction. Presumably, this is why curiosity on the subject is not encouraged. Instead, transgenderism, the new theory of “gender identity”, has become a catch-all: an ideologically fashionable belief system, promising salvation to believers and damnation for heretics.

Those who don’t believe in the new idea of gender identity have become like atheists living in a theocratic society. Imagine, for instance, if an atheist wanted to have a debate with a Christian about the existence of God. But that, as a condition of the debate, the Christian demanded that the atheist not blaspheme, as well as refer to him throughout as a “child of God”. Further, imagine if those facilitating the debate expected the atheist to acquiesce to this demand or else be considered malicious or ignorant. This is precisely what is happening with the transgender debate every time a non-believer feels obligated to use words such as “transgender”, “gender identity”, or pronouns that do not match the sex of his or her opponent.

Of course, the balance between truth and tact, empirical reality and empathy, can be challenging. What pronouns should I use that respect the other’s self-presentation without betraying my argument? How far should I go in adopting the newspeak? Interpersonal conversations are one thing. But political debates are quite another. In what other debate do we allow our opponents to dictate our language?

Of course, often it’s best to politely get on with people, especially with people who are vulnerable and struggling, as many individuals with gender issues are. But when those in positions of power insist that you say something you don’t believe, participate in something you don’t support, or apostatise science and common sense, it’s only right to object.

Ask yourself which of the following you find to be more convincing. That everybody was born “in” a body, then “assigned” a sex by some careless God or whimsical doctor. Or that everybody is a body: immutably sexed (which is, to some extent, disguisable). One of these positions is settled science: self-evident and, until recently, uncontroversial. The other is an oversimplification of a mental disorder, at best. And at worst, a superstition.

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Of course biological sex exists

Tom Chivers — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 00:05:19 +0000

There is a quote that I half-remember from my philosophy degree. It went something like: “The existence of the twilight does not mean we cannot distinguish the day from the night.” It is usually (and possibly apocryphally) ascribed to either Samuel Johnson or Edmund Burke, and describes the continuum fallacy, sometimes called the “fallacy of the beard”.

Most of the time we don’t mind simply saying that some cases are ambiguous. But science loves categories. For instance, species are defined as groups of organisms that can interbreed and produce fertile organisms. House mice, Mus musculus, can breed with other house mice and their offspring are fertile. They are a species. They cannot interbreed with the black rat, Rattus rattus, but rats can breed with each other. The black rat is a separate species.

But there are intermediate cases. There are species of finch on the Galapagos which were thought separate, but a hybrid intermediary has been discovered which can breed with both. Does that mean that, instead of two species, the existence of the intermediate means there is now one? Lions and tigers can interbreed, but only the female offspring are fertile. Are lions and tigers therefore the same species? How about dzo, the cross between cows and yaks? Again, the female is fertile, the male not. Do species therefore not exist?

Or, consider the famous case of Pluto. There are asteroids, and there are planets. Planets are defined by the International Astronomical Union as celestial bodies which are in orbit around the sun, are big enough to have formed a near-spherical shape under their own mass, and which have “cleared the neighbourhood” — that is, swept its orbit clear of other objects. All those criteria are comfortably met by eight of the planets.

But Pluto, although spherical and in orbit around the sun, has not cleared its neighbourhood. Nor have the other bodies Ceres, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake. In 2006, a major astronomical conference declared by fiat that Pluto, therefore, was not a planet; they made up a new category, “dwarf planet”, and shovelled it in there with the other not-quite-big-enough spheres.

There is nothing set in stone about that definition of the word “planet”, or “species”. We could define them any other way. We could say that any sun-orbiting body large enough to have formed a sphere is a planet; then there would be 13, not eight, recognised planets. We could have defined “species” by morphology, by appearance, rather than by breeding compatibility. Definitions are human things, not Platonic forms. Still, almost all humans would agree that Jupiter is a planet, and the asteroid Eros is not; that black rats and house mice are separate species; and that the existence of some edge cases doesn’t change that.

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Having said all that, I’m going to talk about Jo Swinson, leader of the Liberal Democrats.

Swinson, on Radio 4’s Today programme, was asked by Justin Webb whether she believes that “biological sex exists”. She replied: “Not on a binary, from what I’ve read. I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert in the subject but I don’t think that things are as binary as are often presented.”

I should say that she was quite tentative, admitted to not being an expert, and said that it was not a scientific debate she was interested in but one about people facing prejudice and discrimination. She also said that most people do fall into the categories “man” or “woman”. I don’t want to accuse her of flying in both-footed, but I do want to look quite closely at what she’s saying.

With sex, just as with the concepts of “planet” or “species”, there do exist ambiguous cases. The intermediate cases in human sex are usually known as “intersex” people. There are various ways in which one can be intersex: the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA)’s FAQ site mentions genital ambiguity, such as girls with very large clitorises or boys with very small penises, or scrotums that have divided to form labia-like structures; external genitals that appear female, but with male-typical anatomy inside; chromosomal abnormalities, such as mosaicism, when some cells are XX and others XY, or having three sex chromosomes such as XXY; or having standard male XY chromosomes but a body that is insensitive to the androgenic hormones such as testosterone, which tell the embryo to start becoming male.

How common intersex is depends on which of those conditions you consider intersex; if it’s all of them, then perhaps one in 100 children. But it’s not that if you’re intersex you’re neither male nor female. One common intersex condition is hypospadias, a condition in which the male urethral opening is not at the tip of the glans but further back along the underside of the penis, which happens once in every few hundred births.

I think it’s fair to say that most people born with hypospadias would consider themselves unambiguously male. Most people born with complete androgen insensitivity will, to all intents and purposes, be female, and may never know that they have XY chromosomes, unless they get genetically tested (although they will be unable to get pregnant).

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Still, it’s certainly true that some people with intersex conditions would not feel themselves to be the same gender that they were assigned, upon inspection of their genitals, at birth. And it’s also true that, until recently, many intersex babies underwent unnecessary and dangerous surgery because surgeons were too conservative in mind to accept that some people didn’t fit neatly into either sex category. Alice Dreger’s wonderful, horrifying book Galileo’s Middle Finger tells the story of her own activism — along with Bo Laurent, the founder of ISNA — towards ending that practice, and allowing intersex babies to grow up and decide which category they wanted to be in.

Still: that doesn’t mean that sex doesn’t exist “on a binary”. If you did a graph, plotting human beings by height, you will see two clear peaks on that graph — average male height and average female height. If you plot weight, it would be even clearer. Foot size, hip-to-waist ratio. There would be significant overlap between men and women, but there would be very clear differences.

And those are not really sexual characteristics. If you were to plot, say, volume of mammary tissue, or number of ovaries, or number of sperm cells produced, you would see a far, far clearer picture of two enormous spikes with almost no overlap at all. Sex is about as binary as any biological or natural classification gets. It’s certainly a lot more binary than planetary status, and we’re happy to teach kids that Mercury is a planet but Pluto isn’t. There is a twilight, but it’s tiny compared to the size of day and night.

Weirdly, though, “sex is not a binary” seems to be a common claim these days. You get articles about it written in the New York Times, for instance. And you get leaders of relatively major UK political parties saying it in interviews on Radio 4. But while it is possible to define the words “sex” and “binary” in such a way as to make it true, most native English speakers would find those definitions very weird and counterintuitive.

What’s even weirder is that it’s so unnecessary. For one thing, being trans and being intersex are entirely different things. By the nature of intersex condtions, a larger minority than usual of intersex children end up saying that the sex they were assigned at birth is not the one they are comfortable living as – if your genitals are ambiguous, it’s easier for the paediatrician to make the wrong guess. And some intersex conditions don’t appear until puberty; things like congenital adrenal hyperplasia, in which female-born children develop male sexual characteristics.

But most trans people are not intersex. They are physically male or female, but they have an internal feeling which does not match their external characteristics. I’m going to quote ISNA’s FAQs again, on the difference:

“People who have intersex conditions have anatomy that is not considered typically male or female. Most people with intersex conditions come to medical attention because doctors or parents notice something unusual about their bodies. In contrast, people who are transgendered have an internal experience of gender identity that is different from most people.”

The existence of the “twilight” between the categories of day and night does not matter in the case of most transgender people. The argument is not over whether transgender people’s bodies are ambiguous, but whether someone’s description of their internal sense of gender identity should override their physical appearance and history in terms of how society defines them. In fact, I think quite a lot of intersex campaigners actively want to be distinguished from transgender people, because they think it muddies the issues; ISNA at least doesn’t want to abolish the gender binary.

For the record: I am a coward. I have consistently avoided writing about transgender issues; partly, that is, because I don’t think I have any great insight into them, and partly because I think a disproportionate amount of coverage is given to them already, but mainly it’s because I don’t want the online grief. It is a topic which will definitely get me shouted at, so I have avoided it. On this occasion, though, I wanted to get involved, because the Lib Dem leader talking about sex not being a binary struck me as a big deal.

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By Debbie Hayton

Jo Swinson wants — as she said — to help people who are facing extreme prejudice and discrimination, which transgender people clearly do face. You can do that, without making these at best strange and at worst flat wrong statements about biological sex. You can make the arguments about the Gender Recognition Act, about self-ID for trans people, without tying them to biological claims.

That is also the sensible thing to do, because if you tie a moral argument to a factual claim, then if that factual claim turns out to be wrong, your moral argument disappears. The important arguments are about whether self-ID should be sufficient for legal assignment of gender, or about whether safe spaces for women or women’s prisons should be limited to female-bodied people. Those arguments do not hinge on whether or not a small subset of people have sexually ambiguous bodies.

As I mentioned, I’m a coward, so I don’t want to get into those arguments here myself, although I will note that when Swinson said that women commit domestic violence as well as men and so keeping men out of rape shelters isn’t the whole answer, it’s saying something technically true but kind of asinine. Male suspects in domestic homicides outnumbered female ones by more than seven to one in England and Wales from 2016 to 2018. Men — male-bodied people — are simply much more violent than women, and it’s silly to pretend otherwise.

But those arguments are worth having, and important. We should have them openly, not tie them to a strange and frankly unnecessary sideshow about whether the existence of intersex people means that men and women aren’t real. Twilight is absolutely real, but so are day and night.

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Jo Swinson’s feminist credentials are a joke

Sarah Ditum — Tue, 03 Dec 2019 00:04:19 +0000

The Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson wants you to judge her by her feminist credentials. It’s right there in her Twitter bio (“Remainer. Runner. Feminist”). Before she took charge of her party, in the doldrum years between 2015 and 2017 when she was out of Parliament, she wrote a book called Equal Power: Gender Equality and How to Achieve it, which presents itself as a manifesto for solving the male dominance of politics.

Which means that at any other time, the fact that she has built an election platform on the twin planks of making it impossible to measure sex inequality and eliminating women-only spaces, would get her rightfully trashed as a hypocrite.

But we don’t live in any other time. We live in 2019, when the actual “sex” part of sexism makes the most fastidious of progressive speakers squeamish, and talking about women’s rights is seen as dreadfully passé. We’re not supposed to think that oppression occurs on the basis of bodies any more. Instead, it’s framed as question of feelings: everyone has a gender identity, we’re told, and injustice occurs when people aren’t treated in accordance with the identity they claim to have.

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It’s a supremely liberal logic, because it’s wholly individualistic. The problem is no longer to free women from male violence and exploitation, it’s a matter of personal liberty. As Swinson said during her interview with Andrew Marr, she supports gender self-identity so that “everybody can be themselves and be free to live their lives”. Under this reasoning, it would be a deep cruelty to turn a transwoman away from a women’s refuge because it would be a denial of the transwoman’s deeply held sense of self.

But what about the women who need the refuge? There are services for male victims that a transwoman could access. Female victims, who need female-only refuges as a sanctuary from male violence, don’t have that option. They aren’t trying to access women’s services to validate their identities: they’re trying to access women’s services because they’ve been terrified and traumatised by men.

This obvious truth — that women and transwomen both need refuges from male violence, and that there must be separate institutions for everyone to have the security they deserve — is an unspeakable act of transphobia in the eyes of anyone who has accepted the rule of gender identity. Women who have already suffered violence from males who identified as trans to access supposedly female spaces (such as the victims of the rapist Karen White, who sexually assaulted fellow inmates after being moved to a women’s prison) are merely regrettable collateral.

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Single-sex refuges, changing rooms, sports, prisons and toilets were established for women’s protection. When women are forced to share them with males — however those males identify — women are not “free to live their lives”, because they can’t be free from male violence. And there is no test we can apply to reliably identify men who will abuse a system of gender self-identity. Despite the Lib Dem MP Layla Moran’s claim that “I see someone in their soul and as a person. I do not really care whether they have a male body”, soul reading is not yet an objective test.

One of the Lib Dems’ other commitments is to “improve diversity in public appointments by setting ambitious targets”. Ambitious targets sound great, but they’re meaningless without any mechanism for achieving them, all the more so if there’s no way to measure them. Replacing sex with self-identified gender (rather than recording both sex and trans status) immediately renders any sex-disaggregated data farcical. It only takes a handful of male executives ticking the “woman” box in wage-gap reporting for the underpayment of hundreds of junior women to be obliterated.

Actually, Swinson has personal experience of the strange distortions of gender identity applied to sex inequality. Writing in Equal Power about her time working at Viking FM in the 2000s and how male-dominated radio is, she says: “In fact the gender balance was slightly better than we knew at the time, as our anchor breakfast presenter was Stephanie Hirst, at the time known as Simon.” She does not appear to be joking.

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Hirst was, by all external warrants, a man; was hired as a man; was treated by colleagues as a man. Subsequently coming out as a transwoman is personally brave, but it doesn’t retroactively alter the maleness of Viking FM in the previous decade, any more than Swinson would stop being the Lib Dem’s first female leader if she were to declare herself non-binary.

The party’s festishisation of “freedom to” means that it’s offering freedom in name only, which is no kind of freedom for women who need protections for their sex rather than permission for their self-expression. Judged by her feminist credentials, Jo Swinson is a disaster.

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Don’t give in to the bullying trans activists

Graham Linehan — Thu, 14 Nov 2019 00:15:07 +0000

It could be anything. A throwaway line in a press release, or a casting decision, or a packaging design that somehow made it through the focus groups. A charge of transphobia forms in an instant out of nothing, and then follows you around like a loyal, smelly dog.

But don’t panic! I am here to tell you that you can make it to the other side. It’s been a little over a year since I decided to enter into the heated debate around currently fashionable gender ideology and the same activists who smeared the former tennis player Martina Navratilova and the singer Marc Almond as transphobic have thrown everything they could at me too. And yet I have not changed my position one iota from what it was when I began.

I can summarise my position thus: women exist. They are not just an idea or a feeling. They have the right to assembly, the right to organise, the right to demand private and safe spaces free of men and the right to assert these rights without being tormented online by the first generations who didn’t go outside to play.

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By Meghan Murphy

This is what I was able to hang onto in the worst moments: gender ideology is so incoherent that almost everything is now transphobic, including the National Health Service, dictionaries, the Venus symbol on Always sanitary products, The Vagina Monologues and Lou Reed. If they can take a transwoman to court on a charge of transphobia, if they can bully a transwoman, Debbie Hayton, for refusing to adhere to current orthodoxy, they can certainly give you a hard time for whatever transphobic thing it is you’re doing at the moment.

So here are some things to bear in mind while enjoying your turn in the stocks.

First of all, remember that the Equality Act states that you must not be discriminated against on the basis of your sex, not your gender. The singer Sam Smith may ask you to use ‘they’ and ‘them’ when speaking of him, but you are under no legal obligation to do so.

No two people seem to be able to agree on what the word ‘gender’ means, but many, myself included, feel it is the name for the stereotypes associated with either of the sex roles, male and female. Someone feeling an affinity with sex-role stereotypes is not the same as literally being that sex, and many brave transwomen are being forced to confront their dysphoria daily by fighting publicly against this concept, a concept that they feel is cruelly misleading fellow sufferers.

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You will be told there is NO DEBATE. Just talk around anyone who lays that one on you. There is quite clearly a debate needed on the subject of how these ideas impact women’s rights, sports, dignity and safety.

Even Hillary Clinton, perhaps speaking with the freedom that comes after a failed presidential run, said: “I do think there is a legitimate concern about women’s lived experience and the importance of recognising that.” Direct your correspondent to the first point on the SNP’s Women’s Pledge, which states that women have “the right to discuss policies which affect them … without being abused or silenced”. No reasonable person could object to this principle, and their attitude to your asserting it will tell you how seriously to take their concerns.

Many of those writing to you will think they are behaving honourably, even as they direct the most appalling abuse at you. Don’t be intimidated. Be polite if you can, and remember that there are bad-faith actors working the controls and ensuring the temperature of the conversation is kept extremely high. Accusations of bigotry are the first stop on this journey, not the last, so get used to them.

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By Stephen Pollard

Don’t be fooled into thinking your principles are somehow outdated. Women are just as vulnerable to male power and coercion as they were during #MeToo or, indeed, a hundred years ago. Pretending that men have suddenly decided to reform overnight — worse yet, designing policies around that pretence — could result in dreadful things, as when “Karen White”, a male sex offender, successfully identified himself into a position where he was able to sexually assault several female prisoners.

You will see some very frightening and upsetting stats about trans people and suicide, and how you are contributing to those statistics by your continued association with the writer/academic/doctor who has somehow transgressed some arbitrary rules. These statistics have very flimsy underpinnings. The “fact” that 48% of transgender teenagers have attempted suicide is based on a study involving just 27 young people, 13 of whom self-reported having attempted suicide in the past. Of course, any suicide attempt is a tragedy, but these are not the figures of a meaningful and robust study.

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You will be accused of causing violence against transwomen. Murder rates will be quoted. This is deceitful hyperbole. Trans people are one of the safest demographics in the UK. The statistics quoted usually relate to poor transwomen of colour in the USA / South America, many of them driven by poverty into drugs and dangerous sex work. In a like-for-like comparison with statistics on the prospects of poor female sex workers of colour in the same geographic regions, this argument falls apart. Ask your correspondent, finally, if they have any suggestions for actually addressing how poverty and male violence impacts all sex workers, and remind them politely that male violence should never, ever be blamed on women.

There’s more, there’s so much more, and every case is unique. I can’t pretend it’s enjoyable, what you’re about to go through, but at least you will be remembered as one of first who didn’t capitulate to bullies and stood your ground, knowing you will make it easier for the next victim.

Let your principles be your compass, and you will always do the right thing.

But get some Valium.

view comments

Drag kids are the product of a dangerous American delusion

Douglas Murray — Fri, 08 Nov 2019 00:15:58 +0000

“How sexy is that kid?”

If anyone thinks that such a sentence is unimaginable, unutterable in our concerned, paedophile-aware times, then let me introduce you to the gateway-phrase: “Drag kid.”

This week, the world has become a little more aware of this horrid little phrase because the internet has become a little more aware of it. And that is because of the promotion of a 12-year old ‘drag kid’ known by the name Desmond is Amazing.

Desmond was born in America and claims to have become interested in drag at the age of two, after watching Ru Paul’s Drag Race. He says he started going to drag shows at the age of five, since when he has performed in drag, modelled and carved out a role as an “LGBTQ activist”. The website Mashable (which has almost 10 million followers on Twitter) this week sent out a video about Desmond with the following headline: “Desmond is Amazing is the future and we’re here for it.” As it happens, Mashable put Desmond’s age at 10.

Desmond Is Amazing is the future and we're here for it pic.twitter.com/jTWm1rRull

— Mashable (@mashable) November 3, 2019

Even writing about this case is difficult because it only furthers the sort of intrusion which those around Desmond — and especially his mother (who also appears in the Mashable video) — have not only permitted but clearly encouraged. Yet once such things are put before us, we cannot all simply accept them, or remain silent. And the case of Desmond is worth noting not because of its oddity — but because it is an especially modern American story.

First and foremost, it is a story of celebrity. A story in which reality and the search for celebrity become so entwined that it is hard to know what is sincere and what is not, what is real and what is not. In his videos, Desmond talks casually and proudly about “fans” coming up to him in the street, doing “videos” and the like. But this story is not about American children — it’s about American adults and their problem with reality.

It’s about the fantastically shallow and ignorant modern American adult delusion that the ‘self’ is a preternatural thing and exists in some orbit of its own. That everybody has a ‘self’ and that this can be ‘known’. That rather than ‘becoming’, a person ‘discovers’ their ‘self’ – a process which is believed to be truer the faster it is arrived at. “Be yourself!” “Don’t let anyone tell you!” and a thousand other sayings from the Hallmarks Cards philosophy of our time all embed this illiterate idea.

The delusion takes no account of the influences affecting us all — influences which profoundly affect every human from birth. American popular culture takes little or no notice of this non-preternatural fact, because if it did, then it would have to do some accounting for its own behaviour, or at least for the diet of entertainment it is willing to pump into the homes and heads of the very young.

The fastest way to avoid any such accounting is to pretend that people just ‘are’, and that if the wider culture has any impact at all, then it is merely in providing affirmatory, confirming visions which the individual recognises as being in line with the self that they have already intuited.

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How to humanise Westminster

By Various contributors

Let me, in that case, put a contrary point of view. Which is that Desmond’s manner, dress and performance style is not the product of some pre-existing instinct but a mere, evident copy. When he moves his arms like Judy Garland there are two possibilities. One is that Desmond emerged from the womb like Judy. The other is that he watched people, and his mother encouraged him to watch people, who were successful and fascinating to a young child, and he chose to imitate them and was told he could ‘be’ them.

When he says at the outset of the Mashable video, “Can you come up here, you look gorgeous”, in an affected, nasally voice, there may be people who say (like Mashable) “Here is the true 10-year old child”. But most others will say: “Here is a child who you can see is doing an impression of a highly sexualised type of American adult celebrity.” A clear indication of this is that after saying “gorgeous”, Desmond looks to the adults in the room for laughter, approval and affirmation. The adults in the room (presumably including Desmond’s mother) oblige, and thus does he receive what he seeks.

Likewise, when he talks about “haters” and the importance of ignoring them in this and other videos, this is not the innate wisdom of a child being imparted to a bigoted, post-lapsarian world. It is merely another person – this time a child – chanting one of the taught mantras of the American pop-cultural age: “Haters gonna hate” etc. There is no insight here. It is merely a copy, as drag is. A copy of a copy of a copy.

Of course Desmond is not the only child to have been presented in such way. The child reality TV star Jazz Jennings grew up in America as a ‘trans’ child with a reality television serie s. That series made Jennings and her family rich as well as famous. And while still a child (Jennings is now past 18), the male-to-female transsexual was not just celebrated in the same way that Desmond is, but was also asked intrusive and intimate questions. This included – on prime time – questions about who Jazz was attracted to.

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Labour's fun feminists are enabling exploitation

By Douglas Murray

None of this is new: many cultures around the world allow for some form of sexualisation of children. But here it is surprising. The modern West has long exercised such a degree of opprobrium towards the taboo that the slightest hint it might be breaking down affects a great pushback. While people feel distinctly unable to make many moral judgements, about the idea of paedophilia — and that an adult might find a child “sexy” — we are very judgemental indeed. It’s a feeling the tabloid press has harnessed to great effect. Even if there is nothing else we know to be wrong, we know this to be wrong.

By insisting that a child like Desmond should not just be allowed to be something, but should perform as a sexualised adult, and that this should in fact be ‘the future’, it would seem that something further is at work. What is it? It’s unlikely that it is an organised push for tolerance or acceptance of paedophilia. But it does feel like an expression of the ‘Fuck you’ politics of our time.

If people are persuaded – and many Americans are – that they live in a cis-hetero-normative, bigoted, patriarchal, homophobic, transphobic society, in which all difference is squeezed out and forbidden, then that belief may do many things to you. One thing it may do, is cause you to push back with every maddening, extreme tool that you have at your disposal. So people must not simply tolerate things. They must be ‘confronted’ with them. Those who have imbibed this idea have already stretched themselves very far. But in pushing ‘Desmond is Amazing’ on the world, they may have reached one of their limits.

It is an interesting lesson in its way. People pushing tolerance and acceptance of normal differences end up over-compensating, in the vengeful and extreme tone of the time, and in the process risk not ‘liberalising’ the culture, but toxifying the movements they presume to speak on behalf of.

‘Drag children’ are not the way to break down the instinctive conservatism of the American public. They are the best imaginable way to make any such conservatism rear up again, in the knowledge that this time there is something serious not just to oppose, but to defend.

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Why I've reported Douglas Murray to the police

By Titania McGrath

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Don’t you dare ask my pronouns

Julie Bindel — Thu, 17 Oct 2019 23:01:56 +0000

“My name is Jeremy Corbyn and my pronouns are he/him.”

These were the opening words from the Labour Party leader at the Pink News Awards yesterday.

Corbyn hadn’t want to miss an opportunity to virtue signal — on International Pronoun Day, no less. He has impeccable trans-inclusive politics, even supporting the inclusion of men who identify as women on all-female shortlists. Corbyn’s self-appointed advisor on all things trans, Owen Jones, has made it clear to the Labour leader that in order to be on the “right side of history” one must put male-bodied trans women before actual women.

At the @PinkNews awards, @jeremycorbyn introduces himself by saying: “My name is Jeremy Corbyn, and my pronouns are he/him.” ??️‍? pic.twitter.com/WZcTy6VCoy

— Owen Jones (@owenjonesjourno) October 16, 2019

So, as the bearded, twice married father stepped up to the podium at the awards, Corbyn ensured that everyone knew that he identified as male, as opposed to either a woman (she/her) or non-binary (they/them, or ze/zim).

Most of my friends and colleagues block the extremely trans-woke Pink News site from their social media feeds because of the toxic levels of misogyny on its pages. But Corbyn’s words did make it through to the mainstream. They were widely reported by the wokeing class dudebros who were as proud as punch of their Absolute Boy.

But I don’t see anything to be proud of. Indeed, this obsession with pronouns is extremely worrying. Especially now the police have joined in. The same week that government statistics were released showing rape convictions down to a shocking 1.4% of those reported, Deputy Chief Constable Julie Cooke of Cheshire Police found the time to make a video to mark IPD, telling us that for many people, “Being misgendered can have a huge impact on somebody and their personal wellbeing.” So can being raped, but let’s get our priorities right, shall we?

Today marks #pronounsday – seeking to make sharing, educating and respecting personal pronouns commonplace. @pronounsday pic.twitter.com/pe9x9GWTJj

— Julie Cooke (@JulieCooke40) October 16, 2019

For all those lesbians who are constantly told we “look like men” because we refuse to wear make-up, high heels and corsets, and dress for the benefit of men, it is offensive and deeply anti-lesbian to now get asked “what are your pronouns?” We have struggled for years to win respect and acceptance as women — why should we have to spell it out.

There are women I know that look absolutely nothing like men, but who are called ‘sir’ in restaurants or stores, for the simple reason that they reject femininity. The lesbians I know have developed a sense of pride to be able to assert that we are women, despite the fact that we do not exist only in relation to men. To then be asked whether we are he/him or even they/them is ridiculous.

One woman I know who is part of an LGBTQQI+ choir was even put through an arduous and upsetting disciplinary process because she refused to wear a pronoun badge.

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Can you be trans and Christian?

By Christopher Rhodes

The trouble with being able to choose your own pronouns is that it can be abused. If men aren’t identified as men, then they can no longer be held accountable for patriarchy and misogyny. And whether we like it or not, men are the ones to blame for the oppression of women.

Women, on the other hand, are unable, however much some of us may wish, to identify our way out of being oppressed by the male sex class. We cannot escape atrocities such as FGM, forced marriage, rape, or domestic abuse simply by giving ourselves new pronouns.

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Slaying dragons: Corbynism and its cabal of thugs

By Julie Bindel

My generation of feminists fought for the right of women to have single sex services in order to protect us from male violence. We also fought for equal pay, maternity rights and abortion rights, and we stand up against male violence. If men are freely allowed to identify themselves as ‘she/her’, what will happen to all those rights? Our ability to evidence our discrimination and oppression in relation to men will be slowly eroded.

Jeremy Corbyn, the man who took money from a regime that executes men for being gay can present himself as super-woke by telling us he, ahem, identifies as male. But let us also remember that this is the same man who made the ludicrous suggestion that a solution to sexual attacks on the underground was to assign women-only carriages. Does he not see the flaw in his logic? If such a thing existed, all a male-bodied sexual predator would need to do to gain access would be to wear a pronoun badge declaring that his pronouns were ‘she/her’.

My badge? Stop/This/Madness.

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Why the transbullies are a threat to us all

By Julie Bindel

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All the world’s a stage for the trans ultras

Stephen Pollard — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 12:21:04 +0000

Editing a newspaper is the best job in the world. I’ve been doing it for more than 10 years and there’s not been a week when I haven’t found the whole process thrilling.

But I’m going to let you into secret. Part of the thrill is annoying people. Let me put it this way: if you don’t enjoy the idea of people reading your paper and spluttering with indignation, you’re in the wrong job. A newspaper that doesn’t challenge its readers — that simply reflects their views — is not only going to be soporific. It’s also betraying the very idea of a free press.

In which context, let me introduce you to Alistair Smith, the editor of The Stage.

On Friday and Monday, Mr Smith published two pieces from freelance writers on either side of a debate about the Old Vic theatre’s loos. Within minutes of the pieces appearing on The Stage’s site, they were removed. When you find out why, you learn much about the state of public debate and modern issues of free speech.

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By Julie Bindel

As it happens, a year or so ago I was sitting in the stalls of the Old Vic with my wife. Sitting next to her was Sir Tom Stoppard. After the interval, my wife made it back to her seat with just seconds to spare. Sir Tom turned to her, looked at her knowingly, and said words to the effect of: “Aren’t the women’s toilets here a disgrace?” So I was aware before this week’s controversy that there was an issue.

Last week, the theatre announced that it had dealt with the problem. Its solution, however, was to remove the male and female signs and replace them with gender-neutral cubicles and separate urinals. It will now be up to individuals which they use. After a crowd-funded refurbishment, there are now 44 lavatories; previously there were 22. Of the 44, 26 are sit-down loos and 18 urinals.

The Old Vic doubtless considers it has taken a thoughtful step in the battle against discrimination against trans and non-binary people. In reality, it has made things worse for women. Biological women cannot — do I really need to point this out? — use a urinal. But biological men can use a cubicle. So there are only 26 toilets for biological women — and they need to mingle alongside the men (let me be delicate here) preparing to use the urinals.

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Why don't trans activists practise what they preach?

By Meghan Murphy

But the issue I bring to your attention isn’t the rights and wrongs of the Old Vic’s new toilet policy. It is how The Stage has chosen to cover it.

The Stage commissioned one piece arguing in favour of the Old Vic’s move and another, by the writer Sarah Ditum, opposing it. Her article was headlined: “A theatre with inadequate women’s toilets is a theatre that doesn’t care about women.”

You can read the piece on her website, because it is no longer on The Stage’s. Mr Smith removed both articles, according to a statement by the newspaper, because it had received “strong responses” from readers that in posting two pieces putting different views the paper had “only polarised the debate further”. But Ditum’s is a mild and rational piece, with not a word of criticism, stated or implied, of trans and non-binary toilet users. It is about the needs of biological women.

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By Douglas Murray

It is difficult to overstate the spinelessness of Mr Smith’s decision. This was not a debate about the rights and wrongs of, for example, incest or compulsory euthanasia at the age of 60, where one side of the argument is, one might say, controversial. It was a piece about lavatories for women.

In reality, the issue is not even about those facilities. It is about the visceral hatred and abuse that pours forth from some of the more vocal trans activists when anyone dares to question whether there is a difference between sex and gender, the former being biological and the latter, perhaps, a social and cultural construct. And how those in positions of influence — such as editors — react to that noise.

When Ms Ditum’s piece appeared on The Stage, it was met with the usual abuse that any discussion of these always receives (this piece will, too). She was attacked as “anti-trans” and “transphobic”.

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By Julie Bindel

According to the paper: “We have received strong responses from our readers against both articles. We recognise this was an error on our part and would like to apologise. As a result, we have decided to remove both articles from the website.”

Dear God. What is the point of a newspaper if not to prompt strong responses? An editor afraid to publish an article that some people disagree with is an editor who, surely, should be questioning what he or she is doing in the job.
But cowardice is the least of the problems. Because if editors, who decide what does and does not go into a publication, make that decision on the basis of who shouts the loudest, we really are in trouble.

And as Ms Ditum has said of what happened to her piece: “The Stage pulled it (and the companion piece) in response to complaints about me, without forewarning me, thereby giving credence to false accusations against me — but more importantly, denying coverage to a fundamental matter of women’s access to public space. The editor has told me he had no issue with any part of my piece and apologised, but this in no way compensates for the gross editorial cowardice on display.”

The Stage and its editor have now, entirely as a result of their own behaviour, become a symbol of the wider problem of how modern mores dictate that certain arguments may not be made, certain groups may not be offended, and certain issues not raised. And we all worse off for it.

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What women really want? You’ve got no idea

Julie Bindel — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 11:56:50 +0000

“I think my boobs are, well… pretty. They’re neat and round and because they’re so new and small, they don’t sag. I love how they feel, too, and the way I keep being reminded of their presence. I can’t see a flight of stairs, or an escalator on the Tube, without wanting to run up it two steps at a time. I like to come down fast, too. But it’s a very different experience when you suddenly have to clamp a hand across your chest to stop the jiggling.”

So writes the journalist David Thomas, who pens a weekly column in the Daily Telegraph charting his ongoing sex change, and which in his latest column involves telling readers all about the new breasts he has begun to grow as a result of taking female hormones. Thomas seems rather pleased with himself about the whole thing.

As a girl growing up my developing breasts caused me to feel self-conscious and embarrassed, purely as a result of the gawping, sexist males who made my life hell. This was an experience I shared with all the girls in my school, and indeed with girls everywhere. For Thomas, in contrast, flaunting his breasts is a thing of great joy and liberation.

The Telegraph writer’s views about womanhood have certainly evolved over the years. In 1992, Thomas, then a founder of the men’s rights movement, wrote Not Guilty: The Case in Defence of Men, a rant about how feminists have the brass neck to blame men for the terrible things they do to women, rather than themselves. To sum it up, his entire thesis seemed to be “Stop blaming men for the things that nasty women make us do to them!”

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By Julie Bindel

In his hey-day as a men’s rights activist, Thomas suggested that one way for men to break out of the “prison of their gender” was to wear women’s clothing. This was at a time when feminists were critiquing the harmful beauty industry and arguing that femininity – the requirement to trot around in high heels, cake our faces with toxic chemicals and squeeze ourselves into restrictive and uncomfortable clothing – was a tool of our oppression, and an indication of our relative lack of freedom in comparison to that of men. But hey ho, each to their own.

In 1995, Thomas wrote an article in the Telegraph entitled: “If you can’t beat today’s women, then join them,” in which he argued that womanhood is filled with joys and privilege. As an example, he wrote: “A modern girl can play rugby, go to a strip joint, enter any profession and be applauded.” The piece was illustrated with a photograph of Thomas dressed in a flowery dress and holding a handbag.

This is the same man who complained in Not Guilty that “Western society is obsessed with women to the point of mass neurosis”. In the book, Thomas also stated: “The fact is, people are in pain. And right now, the ones who wear trousers and stand up to piss don’t seem to count for much when it comes to being healed.”

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By Julie Bindel and Tom Chivers

Since he clearly thinks women have it far better than men, so perhaps his desire to live as a woman is his way of having it all; he has enjoyed a lifetime of male privilege and can now relax into womanhood. His columns tackle topics such as “facial feminisation”; how his sex change is going to leave him £100,000 short; who he will want to have sex with when he “becomes a woman”; and how to train his voice to be more ‘female’; and how women are very silly indeed to worry about ‘trans women’ in our public toilets. When I write about aspects of womanhood it tends to be about everyday issues facing the entire female sex, or large swathes of them, such as rape, sexual exploitation, domestic violence and murder, FGM, and forced marriage. Clearly I’m not prioritising the crucial issues that Thomas concerns himself with.

Ray Blanchard, the American-Canadian sexologist, best known for his research studies on transsexualism and sexual orientation, coined the term ‘autogynephilia’ in 1991 to mean “a male’s propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a female”. I reckon this term could apply to a man of 60 who seems thrilled when he looks down and sees breasts sprouting on his chest.

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By Julie Bindel

Blanchard, who has been accused of transphobia and banned from Twitter (since reinstated) for arguing that transgenderism is a form of mental disorder, has written comprehensively on autogynephilia, and seems to confirm what many of us have suspected all along – that many heterosexual men who transition in later life often do so to satisfy a sexual urge.

At any rate it can hardly be said that men like Thomas really understand what it’s like to walk in our shoes. His case is similar to Bruce Jenner, who presented as a very masculine man, an Olympic athlete married to three different women with whom he had six children – before becoming Caitlyn Jenner. Jenner once declared that “The hardest part about being a woman is figuring out what to wear,” which is certainly a unique perspective.

I really could not care less whether Thomas calls himself Davina or David; I consider it to be entirely up to him what he wears and how he presents himself. But he has no earthly idea what it means to be a woman, and has spent the past three decades demonstrating just that. While feminists fight for the right for women to break free of oppressive sex stereotypes, the likes of Thomas claim them for himself. It is high time we called out narcissistic autogynephiliacs. I am sick of the cowards who hide behind the few of us who speak out against this male appropriation of what it really means to be a woman, as opposed to a male fantasy of one.

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Why woke men fear real feminism

Julie Bindel — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 10:56:15 +0000

The phrase “I’m not a feminist, but…” has been around for decades, and many of those women uttering these words will be both benefiting from and participating in some aspects of the movement. But since feminism began, there are those that profess their hatred towards us. In a recent article, Tom Chivers unpicks the findings of a poll on young British people’s views on feminism, and finds that, “significant percentages of every age group, including 33% of 18- to 24-year-olds, agrees that feminism makes some men feel marginalised. More men (42%) than women agreed, but a quarter of women did too. The charity themselves described it as ‘staggering’, and linked it to far-right YouTubers.”

Why is anti-feminism always assumed to be a domain of the Right? Clearly, the far-Right hates feminism, because its members hate women and consider us inferior and good for nothing but breeding, cleaning and sex, but most young people in the UK today are on the Left. How then, is the current wave of mainstream misogyny being fed by the alt-Right?

I would wager that a hatred of feminists in the current climate is being fuelled by leftist men who claim to be “on the right side of history” but are, in fact, misogynists dressed up as progressives. Take Owen Jones, using his Guardian platform to regularly stick the boot into feminists who are fighting to retain sex-based rights. In one article, he dismissed my 40 years of activism to end male violence against women and girls, and reduced me to an anti-trans campaigner. This merry band of leftist puppets would have it that those many thousands of women attending public meetings to discuss the potential clash of rights between trans people and natal women if self-identification is introduced in Britain, are also, by default, homophobic bigots.

The birth of the transsexual empire

By Julie Bindel

Feminists that campaign against abuse in the global sex trade are labelled as White Feminists, and, whether they are white or not, racist. No matter how many times black and brown feminists refuse to capitulate to the version of feminism that benefits men a damn sight more than it does women, they are vilified by the super-woke and publicly ‘cancelled’ – social media’s version of witch burning.

When Vice, which has run an article entitled Ban Sex Work? Fuck off, White Feminism published a piece on the murder of the schoolgirl Charlene Downes, based on my investigation a decade ago, I was described as “The journalist Julie Bindel – these days better known for her divisive views on trans issues.” In one sentence, my entire body of work over the past 40 years, including four books on feminism, thousands of articles on rape, domestic violence, child abuse, and trafficking of women, and travelling the world to investigate human rights abuses, is reduced to my views on transgender ideology.

Then there are brilliant feminists, such as the Canadian writer Meghan Murphy being pushed off Twitter. Murphy’s crime? Pointing out that a man who calls himself Jessica Yaniv was a biological male with a penis. Why was that necessary? Because Yaniv had filed complaints against 16 self-employed female beauticians in Vancouver (primarily from ethnic and religious minorities) for refusing to treat his scrotum to a ‘Brazilian wax’.

Feminists should support a woman's right to sell sex

By Victoria Bateman

Countless other feminists, many of whom do amazing work on behalf of the most abused and disenfranchised women and girls on the planet, have also been kicked off Twitter, for ‘misgendering’ men who identify as women. This means that the voices of those perfectly reasonable feminists are being drowned out by a chorus of men who like nothing better than women being silenced in the name of progressive wokeness.

Is it any wonder that so many young people watching this debate unfold want nothing to do with feminism, painted as a movement of bigots, transphobes and homophobes hell-bent on abusing an oppressed group, as opposed to liberating women? The most widely used slur to describe people thought to be anti-trans is Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist (Terf). Not, you may notice, “violent men”, the group most likely to hate and attack transgender people, but feminists.

There is a war against feminists in the UK, and the so-called progressives are the ones throwing the grenades.

Trans athletes make a mockery of women's sports

By Meghan Murphy

I am writing a book on feminism, exploring how so many young women are being sold a version of a glorious liberation movement that is the opposite of reality. During the 50-plus interviews I have done so far, I have been told by women from a range of backgrounds and circumstances that they feel under pressure to sign up to fun feminism, support “sex work”, stripping, porn, and to chant the mantra, “trans women are women!” They are being groomed into hating actual feminism, and adopting a faux-version that does not challenge men at all.

Male Left-wing misogynists who hate feminism are too cowardly and inadequate to be open about it, and would rather rebrand feminism to suit them. The young women who dare to challenge them are exiled. And in the meantime, those of us slogging our guts out to end the global pandemic of sexual and domestic violence, which every woman and girl on the planet fears – and, all too often, experiences – are being painted as reactionary bigots.

Women need feminism, and I will continue to support and mentor young women resisting the dudes trying to indoctrinate them about what type of feminism is ‘acceptable’. Men on the Right are not, in my view, ever going to be feminist allies, but nothing is as pernicious as a sheep in woke clothing.

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Why aren’t illiberal universities challenged?

Nigel Biggar — Fri, 01 Feb 2019 07:00:49 +0000

We need to talk about ‘discrimination’, ‘homophobia’, and ‘identity’. In fact, we need to rethink them. Daily, these words are trotted out as if their sense were as good as it is common. But it really isn’t.

At the beginning of the new year, the young Thought Police who guard our own egalitarian Cultural Revolution targeted their latest victim. John Finnis is an eminent legal philosopher, whose trademark is precise, relentlessly logical reasoning, and who is best known for pioneering a novel and sophisticated theory of natural law. He is also a conservative Roman Catholic, whose moral arguments tend to support the official teaching of his church. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that he holds unfashionably critical views about homosexual practice.

In the second week of January, two postgraduate students of law at Oxford University, Alex Benn and Daniel Taylor, launched a petition to have Finnis banned from teaching. Their case against him is his long record of “extremely discriminatory views against many groups of disadvantaged people”. He is known, they say, for being “particularly homophobic and transphobic”, and his “hateful statements” include the assertion that “being gay is ‘evil’”. By allowing Finnis to teach, they claim, Oxford University permits the promotion of hatred towards LGBTQ+ students.

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By Helen Dale

Shortly after the petition’s launch, Messrs Benn and Taylor asserted in a Guardian article that, through his stated views, Finnis “dehumanises” disadvantaged groups and implies that LGBTQ+ individuals are “morally bad or inferior”. A few days later, the Guardian itself weighed in with an editorial that declared that “by reason of his religious commitments, [Finnis’s] language, and indeed his beliefs, are profoundly homophobic… [His] repugnant views … violate our moral sensibilities.” While it conceded, not very generously, that “freedom of religion implies the freedom to be wrong, and to argue in absurd and morally disgusting ways”, it nevertheless called upon Oxford’s law faculty to “reconsider his invitations to its seminars” (sic). By 22 January, Benn and Taylor’s petition had attracted 626 signatures.

Let me make clear, before I go any further, that I disagree with John Finnis about the immorality of gay sex. I am more appreciative than the Guardian of the deeper reasons for his position, not being content to dismiss it, incuriously, as “weird” and “absurd”. Many – perhaps most – societies throughout history have taken against homosexual practice, as have luminaries such as Plato and Kant. To dismiss all these as ‘homophobic’ is not only intellectually lazy, but, worse, it doesn’t explain very much.

If one takes the trouble to scrutinise the ancient Hebrew or Christian traditions, for example, it becomes clear that the driving concern is the survival of human society through the generation of children. In times and places where human societies are vulnerable to sudden destruction by famine, disease, and war – that is, in every part of the globe throughout most of human history – a strong emphasis on the vital social duty of reproduction isn’t hard to understand. And so long as there is reason to fear that homosexual practice, once allowed, might become so popular as to predominate, a strong social bias against it is really not absurd.

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By Polly Mackenzie

Now, however, in our Western societies, which have enjoyed the privileges of peace, food security, modern medicine, and the development of artificial reproduction for several generations, and which have discovered that tolerating gay sex doesn’t in fact result in a societal pandemic, the arguments against homosexual practice just don’t stack up.

So I don’t agree with Finnis. But nor do I agree with Benn, Taylor, and the Guardian that he should be banned from the classroom. To start with, there is an obvious and entirely innocent sense in which Finnis’s view of homosexual practice is discriminatory: he thinks it immoral. He thinks it “evil”, just as Benn and Taylor and the Guardian think his view is morally “repugnant”. By definition, a judgement discriminates, and a moral judgement discriminates between right and wrong. Unless we’re going to banish the public expression of moral judgements, we have to recognise that at least one kind of discrimination is perfectly legitimate.

What the law rightly forbids, is the unequal treatment of people – that is, discrimination against them – on the ground of such things as race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. This is because those features are morally indifferent: the mere fact of being, say, ethnically African, Muslim, female, or homosexually oriented does not make anybody guilty of moral wrong-doing. Insofar as ‘being gay’ means simply ‘being a homosexually oriented person’, someone as characteristically precise as Finnis would never have called that ‘evil’. One cannot usually be held responsible for the orientation of one’s sexual desire; one can only be held responsible for the practical expression one chooses to give it. Therefore, to say that engaging in homosexual acts is morally wrong is not to say that being a gay person is evil.

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How have we let scientific study become hate speech?

By Meghan Murphy

I imagine that Finnis’s critics would protest that sexual expression is essential to gay identity, and, since gay identity is essential to the humanity of gay people, any criticism of gay practice is dehumanising. But this isn’t true. Sexual expression is a choice, for which the chooser is responsible; and all responsible choices are susceptible of moral assessment and criticism. Powerful though sexual desire is, and painful though it may be to control it, it doesn’t have to find expression in sexual relations. Some people choose to be celibate; others, lacking alternatives, must be.

Identity is also a choice. We all inherit identities, but we’re not fated to adhere to them: I was born British, but, married to an American, I could have chosen to identify myself with the US. I deliberately opted not to. What’s more, we usually inherit or have the opportunity to adopt several identities, and it’s not determined which ones we’ll choose to make a song and dance about. Identities are not fates; they involve choices, for which we are morally accountable.

So to criticise homosexual practice, or the choice to identify oneself with it, is not to assault the very humanity of homosexually oriented people, claiming that they should be treated like animals or worse. By the same token, nor is it to express hatred against practising homosexuals. There is a common and insidious tendency on the part of our Revolutionary Guards to dismiss any criticism of their assumptions as ‘phobic’ – as Zionists too often rubbish criticisms of the Israeli government as ‘anti-Semitic’.

Last August, after I’d published an article in the Times entitled Obsession with gender identity goes too far, in which I expressed doubts about the current ideology of transgenderism, I was immediately labelled ‘transphobic’. However, as I had explained, in order to fear or hate something, I’d first have to have some idea of what it is I’m fearing or hating; and my problem with claims to transgender identity is that I find myself unable to understand their content. After all, what does it mean to be a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’, now that feminists have rightly taught us to jettison sexist stereotypes? Before I am able to be phobic, I first need to get past being baffled.

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By Debra Soh

So bafflement explains my delinquency far better than phobia. In Finnis’s case, charity obliges that, before we attribute his (faulty) reasoning to irrational hatred, we first consider kinder and equally plausible alternatives. One obvious candidate is his absolute faith in the veracity of the moral teaching of the Roman Catholic Church – which shouldn’t be so very strange to ardent True Believers in Revolutionary Dogma. A sense of irony, self-awareness, and charity, however, don’t feature prominently in the conduct of the young thought-police, who are far too busy venting aggressive, illiberal self-righteousness.

Disturbingly, this illiberality is not confined to students. In December 2017 I became the target of three online denunciations, one by students, but two others by several hundred academics worldwide. My crime? That I had argued in an article in the Times that Britons have reasons for pride, as well as shame, in the British Empire; and that I’d launched a collaborative research project, “Ethics and Empire”, which is designed to assess moral critiques of empire from ancient China to the modern period.

My consistent experience of these professional academics is that they do not trouble themselves to understand what they are criticising, nor to pay attention to any replies that they receive. Last autumn, a Kings College London organiser of one of the denunciations, speaking at a London think-tank, cavalierly attributed to me a stupid view that I have never held and made plain that he hadn’t bothered to read any of the responses that I’d published almost 12 months previously.

This was nothing compared with the abuse earlier sprayed out by the Cambridge academic, who tweeted that I was ‘racist’, a ‘white supremacist’, the ‘Rev Bigot’, and anything that came out of my mouth was ‘vomit’. When I complained about her behaviour to the heads of her college and faculty – not least, that if she treated me in that fashion, how on earth would she treat dissident students? – they responded that her conduct was legal and that therefore they would do nothing about it. Shortly afterwards two other academics published an article positively condoning her abuse in the Times Higher Education Supplement.

Suggested reading

How the Left conquered social media

By Helen Lewis

The problem is not primarily intellectual; it’s moral. It seems that many professional academics have not been taught to develop the basic virtues of emotional self-restraint, justice, charity, and humility. They feel no need to hold in check their feelings of irritation, indignation, hatred – and fear. They recognise no obligation to be scrupulously fair to their opponents. They don’t understand that the most cogent critique is one that charitably construes the opposing case in the strongest possible terms, and only then sets about dismantling it.

And most of all, they seem to lack any sense that they might be mistaken, or that they might have something to learn. In my theological moments, I have wondered whether we are now witnessing the fruits of a post-Christian culture that remembers everything about social justice, but nothing at all about the universal spread of human sin. If that’s so, then we’re going to have to get used to a whole lot more unhearing, unintelligent, unforgiving, ugly self-righteousness.

So there’s the deeper problem. What can be done about it? The first, basic step is to call it out and expose it. Beyond that, university leaders should be pressed to start taking some responsibility for it. They will take some persuading, however, because for generations now, they have complacently behaved as if moral formation and the maintenance of civil norms are either unnecessary (because everyone knows, don’t they, what decent behaviour is?) or someone else’s responsibility (surely, parents or schools?).

Now, however, the chickens of neglect are coming home to roost. Some professional academics are spitting out vile abuse at politically incorrect colleagues, while others condone it. Other academics and postgraduates are organising online denunciations designed to shut down heretical projects or ban heretical colleagues from the classroom.

Meanwhile, applicants, students, and untenured junior scholars are watching and observe the passivity of college and faculty heads and the prevailing silence of their classroom colleagues. So, mindful of their careers, they resolve to censor themselves or at least keep their mouths prudently shut. The result is that, notwithstanding Vice-Chancellors’ reassuring affirmations of freedom of speech from on high, a climate of illiberality and mistrust is quietly spreading down below.

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How have we let scientific study become hate speech?

Meghan Murphy — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 07:00:22 +0000

The growing trend in young people suddenly deciding they are “in the wrong body” and must “transition” to the opposite sex is alarming. It means that more and more kids are being sent down a path of drastic body and life changes. The consequences of getting this wrong could not be more serious. Study after study has shown that a majority of youth who claim to have gender dysphoria do not continue to experience this in adulthood. Yet the puberty blockers and the hormone treatments given to ‘trans kids’ eventually lead to permanent sterilisation. And yet as the trend takes hold, the attempts to shut down public debate also grow stronger – which is just as alarming.

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

Academic studies and public debate should not be narrowly determined by those committed to the ideologies in question

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

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

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

Further reading

When did women's rights stop being human rights?

By Jo Bartosch

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

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

Further reading

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

By Julie Bindel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading

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

By Owl Fisher

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

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

Those who dare question the concept of gender identity itself are treated as blasphemers and bigots, viciously harassed, attacked, and even fired

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

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

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

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What does gender have to do with genitals?

Julie Bindel — Fri, 21 Dec 2018 06:30:27 +0000

When I came across the tweet “Very much looking forward to a lovely lazy Xmas break and then to cracking on with my article about why ‘sex’ (as in ‘biological’ not desire) is no longer applicable to contemporary feminist theory and activism”, I assumed it was from a Tumblr kid with a blue fringe and an attitude problem who had yet to learn about the birds and the bees.

How wrong I was. The person making the extraordinary claim that biological sex has nothing whatsoever to do with feminism was Sally Hines, Professor of Sociology and Gender Identities at the University of Leeds. In other words, someone responsible for the education of our impressionable youth.

Very much looking forward to a lovely lazy Xmas break and then to cracking on with my article about why ‘sex’ (as in ‘biological’ not desire) is no longer applicable to contemporary feminist theory and activism.

— Sally Hines (@sally_hines) December 15, 2018

In recent years, the trans debate has produced some crazy views: that men can get pregnant, for example, and that boys can get periods. We women are told to use certain terms to describe our bodies, such as chest feeding, and ‘front hole’ so as not to exclude or offend transgender people.

But this tweet was the clearest example I have seen of the Orwellian double-think employed by a growing number of academic trans-allies: conflating the terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. It’s a plank of extreme transgender ideology to deny that there are real and tangible differences between male and female biology, in order, I assume, to make the mantra, ‘trans women are women’ sound less extreme.

Fact and logic – the very bedrock of academic study – are increasingly disappearing when the issue of transgender ideology is on the table. As Kathleen Stock, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex explains, it is currently quite fashionable among certain academics to promote the view that biological sex is a social construct.

“Biological sex has a social meaning (gender), but that doesn’t remove the underlying material facts – the social meaning wouldn’t last for long if the biology wasn’t there to underpin it,” says Stock. “To deny this is insulting to those millions of females all over the world who are exploited for their reproductive capacities, or punished for the lack of them.”

Further reading

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

By Owl Fisher

We women are oppressed on the basis of our biological sex, which is why feminists refer to our status as a ‘sex class’ (like the Marxist analysis of ‘working’ and ‘ruling’ class). Biological sex is the bedrock of women’s oppression. Females in every country in the world are abused and treated as second class citizens because of our biology. Unintentional pregnancy, criminalised abortion, death during childbirth, being left with the burden of caring duties… all this happens to us because we are female, not because of how we identify. Female genital mutilation, bride burning, sex selective abortion, rape, sexual harassment, anorexia, these are all part of the human female condition.

And that is why we would argue so strongly against those who would prefer to have it believed that biological sex does not exist. Look, for example, at this recent article in the New York Times. The writer correctly states: “Defining gender as a condition determined strictly by a person’s genitals is based on a notion that doctors and scientists abandoned long ago as oversimplified and often medically meaningless.” What on earth does gender have to do with genitals? Genitals determine our physical, biological sex, and indicates whether we are male or female, not whether we are destined to like pink or blue.

No one, medic or otherwise, can ‘determine’ gender because it has no basis in material reality. It is comprised of sexist stereotypes. It is a tool of the patriarchy, made up to keep girls and women in place, and to privilege men. Girls are railroaded into playing with tea-sets and wearing pink dresses, and boys and encouraged into rough-and-tumble games and told they can grow up to be soldiers. These are rather crude examples of how boys and girls are socialised into behaviours that are seen by almost everyone – except feminists – to be appropriate to their sex (male or female).

Further reading

When did women's rights stop being human rights?

By Jo Bartosch

Gender is a social construct to keep girls and women subservient to men and boys. But sex is biology. And yet here we have an academic writing about how it is no longer applicable to feminist theory. How can female biology be irrelevant to feminism? When a pregnant woman is not hired, or sacked, this is down to sexism based on our biological functions. If a woman is infertile, or chooses not to have babies, she is often seen as worthless and a failure. Surely it is the job of an academic to explore and interrogate material reality? How is it that a professor of sociology can make such an Orwellian statement? Every female on the planet suffers as a result of the way her body and reproductive functions, in other words her biology, is treated by men under patriarchy.

The oppression and subordination of women, also part of our condition, is prevalent in every society, every nation, and across class, ethnic and cultural groupings.

Claiming that biological sex has nothing to do with the status of females is akin to claiming that the earth is flat. The difference is though, no-one appears to be afraid of laughing at flat-earth fantasists, but most people are still, despite a raging, public debate, are scared to challenge the transactivist extremists.

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Can academia be saved from the mob?

Debra Soh — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 06:30:24 +0000

When we think of academia, we think of an idyllic landscape where fresh, young minds embark on a fearless pursuit of intellectual inquiry and knowledge. Well, we need to think again. Because the university climate has changed so significantly in recent years, it now stands in stark contradiction to these goals.

Such is the temperature on campuses today, that academics are having to self-censor, with fears of retribution dictating the kinds of scientific questions they pursue.

The culture of fear and intimidation they face at the moment impedes academic freedom and the ability to conduct meaningful work. Scientists in the field of sex research, for example, are terrified to pursue questions pertaining to sex differences, gender, and sexual orientation, for fear that any politically unpopular findings will end their career.

When news broke regarding The Journal of Controversial Ideas, which is launching in early 2019 and will allow scholars to publish their work pseudonymously in it, my academic colleagues, among them many liberal researchers, gave a collective sigh of relief: since they will able to publish their work pseudonymously in it.

Further reading

How have we let scientific study become hate speech?

By Meghan Murphy

This new journal, though, would allow academics to avoid the ugly fallout that currently comes from having your name attached to controversial views – treatment ranges from public shaming and job loss to death threats and harassment directed at you and your family. Perhaps predictably, though, barely 24 hours after plans for the journal were announced, a fleet of media articles were published questioning its launch.

Annabelle Timsit wrote one for Quartz. In it, she expresses concern that submitting work under a pseudonym “risks creating a free-for-all wherein any idea, no matter how discriminatory, unethical, or repugnant, might be considered worthy of debate”.

The journal will, however, be peer-reviewed and so evaluated by experts in the relevant fields, ensuring that papers will meet a rigorous standard. Jeff McMahan, a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Oxford and one of the journal organisers, has also said that it will be intellectually and politically diverse.

Further reading

What's so blasphemous about free speech?

By Helen Dale

Timsit voices fears that such a journal would house “a bias toward publishing particularly controversial ideas in the interest of freedom of thought”. This has echoes of the Left’s argument that the Right invented the term “political correctness” in order to defuse attacks on their “no longer acceptable” and “bigoted” views, rather than because liberals were stifling free speech. But academics need to be able to think and speak freely when conducting their research; unfiltered speech is grounded in good faith – not the desire to seek out controversy for the sake of it.

Which brings us to the question of why those on the Left aren’t celebrating the arrival of the launch. Freedom of speech isn’t solely of concern to the Right; academic freedom has, after all, allowed those on the Left to call into question issues such as climate change denial and creationism. They remain silent now, though, because they know they are winning the culture war.

Good scholarship, however, should stand regardless of an academic’s identity and political position, and McMahan points out that “[it] should make no difference who the author is”. We must have faith in the process of academic debate. If ideas without merit are submitted, then academics should be counted upon to call them out — that’s how the model is supposed to work, not by silencing these perspectives and preventing them from being heard.

Further reading

If politicians lie, then why shouldn't I?

By Douglas Murray

It is interesting that Timsit also tries to play down the troubles on campus at the moment. “[There] is,” she says, “also reason to believe that the panic surrounding free speech on campus in recent years has been overblown,” and that “freethinking academics are far from the only victims of the wrath of social media trolls; many people from across the political spectrum face vilification, harassment, and threats online”.

Anyone who spends a reasonable amount of time on a university campus will know only too well the extent to which free speech is under threat. The problem of censorship is not, however, limited to “conservative thoughts”— anyone voicing an opinion that is even remotely to the Right of far-Left orthodoxy becomes suspect, including centrists and those who are otherwise Left-leaning.

If you have any doubt as to how toxic the environment has become, you need only look at how frequently university campuses have been subjected to protests and mobbing behaviour in the last few years as a result of challenging Leftist dogma: University of Missouri, Yale University, UC Berkeley, Evergreen State College, Lewis & Clark College, Sarah Lawrence College. The list goes on. These instances are so numerous, they are on the verge of becoming the norm.

Further reading

Victimhood culture will tear us apart

By Jenny McCartney

I recently interviewed Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College and self-identified Leftist and feminist, who in the spring of 2017, was viciously mobbed online after publishing an academic paper on transracialism — the idea that some individuals choose to identify as a particular race that is different from their racial background. She had asked whether there were parallels between being transgender and being transracial. It was a provocative argument, one that has been posed by some conservatives in the past, and I thought well within the bounds of legitimate academic discussion.

Instead of engaging with Tuvel’s points, however, other academic scholars took to social media to attack her, calling her “transphobic” and “racist,” and threatening her academic career. Hypatia, the journal that published Tuvel’s paper, issued an apology, and two members from Tuvel’s dissertation committee, Lori Gruen at Wesleyan University and Lisa Guenther at Vanderbilt University, signed an open letter denouncing the work. This is the level of shaming and ostracisation Tuvel faced for merely posing a question.

Tuvel told me what she endured has had lasting effects on her field, with academics steering clear of projects pertaining to gender and race. I saw a lot of this sort of thing during my time as an academic researcher — that in devising new research projects, some colleagues would intentionally avoid topics that could be interpreted as even potentially controversial. One such subject, for instance, is gender dysphoric children. Unless a researcher is supportive of the early transitioning approach, they have no hope of surviving in academia. In my case, writing about this issue led to my own decision to leave upon finishing my PhD.

Further reading

How moral is mockery?

By Giles Fraser

It only takes a few loud voices, as we’ve seen, to send a wider trend of fear and intimidation throughout the ivory tower, silencing entire areas of inquiry. Higher learning is being killed by student activists, who claim they are doing what is best for society while dictating what professors are allowed to say in their classrooms.

In a given 70-hour work week, professors are conducting original research and writing papers, submitting grants, mentoring their graduate students, teaching classes, and fulfilling administrative duties. The last thing they want is to be pursued by a mob excoriating them on social media and in the press, and possibly showing up at their door. In its most drastic form, students will default to physical violence, as we saw during the 2017 protest at Middlebury College that left a professor concussed and in a neck brace as she attempted to shield Charles Murray from his attackers.

Of all people, academics should be protected from this behaviour, because we have no other way of vetting the truth. Instead, mobbing is not only encouraged, but celebrated. Even if an academic survives a bout with the mob, rarely is an apology issued. Many are instead hounded out of the academy, their professional reputations so tarnished that they have no alternative but exile.

Further reading

John Milton: smug liberal and free-speech warrior

By Polly MacKenzie

This extends beyond publishing controversial work. Just look at those various academics who have voiced ‘unacceptable’ opinions, such as Nobel laureate Tim Hunt, who was hung out to dry after making an innocuous joke about his experiences working with women, or Nicholas and Erika Christakis, who resigned from positions at Yale University after advocating that students choose their own Halloween costumes, and physicist Alessandro Strumia, who was suspended from his position at the European nuclear research centre CERN for presenting data suggesting the sciences have become sexist toward men.

An academic’s purpose isn’t to promote ideas that are crowd-pleasing and sanctifying. It is to interrogate our beliefs in order to come away with a better understanding of the world. When academic institutions are unable to facilitate honest discussions in search of this truth – the very thing they were built to stand for – the academy has lost its way. Sometimes the truth is uncomfortable, but this isn’t a reason to pretend that it doesn’t exist, or to punish those who wish to explicate it.

In a perfect world, currently existing journals would stand up to the bullying, intimidation, and silencing, and academic institutions would protect their faculty. In our febrile, fearful world, anonymity will have to do.

view comments

Why don’t trans activists practise what they preach?

Meghan Murphy — Fri, 23 Nov 2018 11:25:44 +0000

Last month, Rachel McKinnon won the world title in the women’s 35-44 sprint at the 2018 UCI Masters Track Cycling World Championships. Under normal circumstances, such an achievement would have gone unnoticed by most of the public. But this win was controversial: McKinnon was male — a self-identified transwoman.

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

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

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

— Jennifer Assali (@jkwagnermd) October 18, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suggested Listening

Test article

By Julie Bindel and Trevor Phillips

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

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

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

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

Suggested reading

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

By Owl Fisher

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suggested reading

Why the transbullies are a threat to us all

By Julie Bindel

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

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

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

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

— Meghan Murphy (@MeghanEMurphy) November 21, 2018

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

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

view comments

Why am I turning to the Left?

Graeme Archer — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 12:23:58 +0000

It’s a question beloved of sleb-PR pieces in the Sunday papers, isn’t it: “Who would you invite to your dream dinner-party?” Almost everyone uses it as a chance to show off: “Gandhi, Jesus, Nelson Mandela, some dirty-looking French sociologist from the 1960s, oh and my wife says I’m not allowed to invite Madonna!” Chortle.

Until recently, my own version would have been just as predictable. But with Verity Lambert, Doctor Who’s first Producer at the top of the list. Today, though, thinking of the people with whom I’d most like to sit down with for a conversazione, I noticed a startling phenomenon. Here are my dream dinner-party guests:

Julie Bindel, Peter Tatchell, Janice Turner, Linda Bellos, Claire Fox, Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian.

Further reading

CLR James rejected the posturing of identity politics

By Ralph Leonard

Startling? Certainly from my PoV: they’re all on the Left. God in heaven: am I becoming Left-wing with age?

No, I’m not “on a journey” from centre-Right to radical-Left. Cut me in half and I bleed the same suburban lower-middle class Toryism that pooterishly informs all the pieces I write for UnHerd: I am aspidistra-man! Come, sit quietly on the bus with me, and let’s keep ourselves to ourselves, shall we?

But it’s nothing as basic as party (or even class) allegiance that conjures my imagined affinity with a heterogeneous but definitely Leftish group of activists, thinkers, writers and academics.

It’s their commitment to intellectual rigour; their willingness, even if it costs them abuse from fellow members of their tribe, to use words as clearly as possible to describe the world as best as rational people can manage.

Further reading

Aristotle's answer to identity politics

By Henry Olsen

Janice writes for the Times – without doubt, that newspaper’s best writer, by several orders of magnitude – often about the Gender Recognition Act, documenting the actual violence committed against actual women by some of the GRA’s most vociferous advocates. Just recently, she produced a column that took on what elsewhere I’ve called “wordcrime”, the practice of some activists to equate any stated doubts about gender self-identification with physical violence against transgender people, and to use this pseudo-equivalence to shut down debate.

Whence comes the self-righteous fury of the activists, such as those who resigned from the judging panel of the Comment Awards in fury that Turner’s name was included in a short-list? What gives activists the intellectual heft to pervert a thoughtful question from a government minister about the rise in gender reassignment consultations for young people into accusations of an actual crime?

Academia does this odious heavy-lifting, of course. Pseudo-academia, anyway, and I can only apologise for the ubiquity of that prefix in this piece: it’s simply too apposite to ignore. One of the Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian papers, accepted for publication, recommended “experiential reparations” for “privileged students”, reparations that included “sitting on the floor, wearing chains, or intentionally being spoken over”. When academics believe such ideas worth publishing, then they must (one assumes) be teaching similar obscenities to their students.

Further reading

How the powerful are perverting the truth

By Graeme Archer

Thus the generation of that most lethal form of activist, the campaigner whose self-righteous desire to criminalise your thoughts is justified by appeal to “theory”. The social ills my dinner party companions are fighting draw their toxic liquor, I think, from the poisoned well of grievance studies in the University.

There was much talk this summer about the need for a new “centre” party, talk that quickly evaporated as the motives of the leftover Blairites and unpopular Conservatives involved became clear. We don’t need a new vehicle to provide income and pensions for endless squealing about the EU referendum.

We do need a movement to take on and defeat modern identity politics, however, wherever it raises one of its Hydra heads. Such a campaigning movement needs the active participation of the centre-Right too: this is the “radical centre” that Britain needs.

So forget the dinner-party; this is more important than wondering with whom it’d be fun to share a prawn cocktail. I’ll stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone ready to take on the baleful wrath of the identity politics demon. Even those whom in other circumstances I’d be campaigning against, and who (I’d guess) would cross a busy street to avoid having to be polite to one of my political hue.

If you added up the voices of those opposed to the Gender Recognition Act’s outrageous proposals, or those who are sick of being told that to voice any misgiving about redefinitions of gender is equivalent to violence – add up the gay voices with the straight, the male and the female, Labour with Tory – then I’m pretty sure the outcome would constitute a clear majority.

Further reading

Don't be so quick to laugh at the 'grievance study' hoax

By Tom Chivers

Let’s not have a new party – neither for dinner, nor for politics. But a new movement, indifferent to how its supporters vote in general elections, to turn the tide against the pathologically selfish leaders of the ID political movement.

Tories can’t leave this battle to the Left, and intervene only when there’s a chance to make short-term political capital. The demon of identity politics doesn’t care how you’ll vote at the next general election. It’s whispering, now, in the minds of your children; your taxes are funding its teacher-priests in the pseudo-academy.

If we allow identity politics to reshape the permitted contours of political discourse; if we look the other way when good socialists are attacked for defending intellectual rigour and political liberty, then within two generations there won’t be a good society left for any mainstream politician, Tory or Labour, to defend.

view comments

Sex: a warning from history

Matthew Sweet — Tue, 30 Oct 2018 06:30:18 +0000

A spring evening in 1908. In the drawing room of 46, Gordon Square, Virginia Woolf is talking about herself. Her sister, Vanessa Bell, is busy with her needle and scissors. Suddenly, a man appears in the doorway – the spidery figure of Lytton Strachey, future author of Eminent Victorians, Bloomsbury’s sweetest poison pen letter to the 19th century. He points a long finger at a stain on Vanessa Bell’s dress, and asks a question. “Semen?”

“With that one word,” wrote Woolf, “all barriers of reticence and reserve went down. A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us. Sex permeated our conversation … It was, I think, a great advance in civilization.” Woolf, however, did not declaim her story about the death of Victorian restraint in 1908. She told it to a small group of friends in 1921. It remained unpublished until 1976, with the caveat, “I do not know if I invented it or not.”[1. Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings by Woolf, Virginia ed. Jeanne Schulkind (Brighton: Sussex University Press, 1976)]

The history of sexuality sometimes looks simple – a costume pageant in which roister-doistering Enlightenment libertines give way to Victorian evangelical killjoys, who, after sending Oscar Wilde to an early grave, are staked in theirs by the Freudians, the Bloomsbury group, and the 60s generation liberated by the Pill. That apparent simplicity is an illusion produced by our desire to make ourselves the heroes in a Whig history of sex – one that leads from tight-laced ancestor-figures to laid-back, sorted, liberated us.

Suggested reading

How come the misogynistic Frankie Boyle is so acceptable now?

By Jenny McCartney

Today, that confidence is harder to detect. The appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme court has added energy to the backlash against #MeToo – music, doubtless, to the ears of the disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. The present American administration contains men whom Margaret Atwood might have sketched in one of her more pessimistic moods. Roe vs Wade is in their sights. So is legislation that will argue transgender identities out of existence. And in this area, the arc of easy progress seems particularly broken. Science has revealed that biological sex is not purely binary, but determined by a constellation of genetic, chromosomal and hormonal factors that culture has yet to decide how far it wants to reflect. This is a transitional moment for everyone.

The history of sexuality might give us the means to negotiate it – not least because our attempts to describe it over time are a good demonstration of Friedrich Nietzsche’s argument in the Genealogy of Morals (1887) that nothing with a history can ever be defined. Sex has no discoverable past: it resides in the body. Sexuality is very different. It moves in culture. It is contingent, provisional and mutable. It has been escaping from and reacting to classification since the mid 19th-century, when medical science first began reorienting ideas about sexual behaviour from a focus on human acts to a focus on human types, and generated new and exotic beings such as similsexuals, monosexuals, uranians, uraniads, inverts and urnings. (Heterosexuals didn’t turn up to the party until 1869, which makes them a more recent invention than roller skates, the vacuum cleaner, or Harrods.)

The subjects of this research could not avoid responding to this new lexicon of sex. Oscar Wilde and his circle looked for evidence of themselves in Psychopathia Sexualis (1887) Richard von Krafft-Ebbing’s textbook of sexual categories. (The book was mentioned at Wilde’s trial.) The hero of EM Forster’s Maurice – begun in 1913 – describes himself as “an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort”. But his psychiatrist substitutes a more precise term – “homosexual” – introduced to the English language by the 1892 translation of Krafft-Ebbing.

Suggested reading

Why does the Left hate gay Tories?

By Graeme Archer

These taxonomic projects now offer a revealing snapshot of the cultures that produced them. In the same year that the Woolf and her friends had their spermy epiphany on Gordon Square, Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson, an American sexologist who wrote under the pseudonym Xavier Mayne, issued a psychometric questionnaire called “Am I at all an Uranian – Am I at all a Uraniad?” Responds were asked, “Do you whistle well, and naturally like to do so?” “Do you like rural solitude?” “Are you peculiarly fond of Wagner?” Easy to imagine readers of Henry James and Edith Wharton frowning over the questions and asking: is this me?

We could ask it of ourselves. If we accept that our sexualities are subject to cultural and historical forces, the back catalogue of human experience might offer ways to question our own orthodoxies. In the 1880s, for instance, the writer Edward Carpenter lived in a ménage-a-trois with a Sheffield scythe-maker and his wife. They wore sandals, grew their own vegetables, and conducted a life that informed Carpenter’s book The Intermediate Sex (1908), which proposed mutually beneficial social alliances between homosexual and heterosexual couples. Doesn’t sound too dreadful.

And now those Rumpelstiltskins of the alt-right, the incels, have emerged into the light, might it not be worth looking back to the work that Freud’s pupil Wilhelm Reich published in the 1930s, which suggested that political extremism was fuelled by unexpressed sexual energy? (One of its few visible signs today is Shrek, whose creator, William Steig, was a follower of Reich and made the ogre an embodiment of his ideal type – a figure unswayed by authority and utterly at ease with his own effluvia.)

Suggested reading

Gender preference has no place on a birth certificate

By Meghan Murphy

But there are other, colder, less flattering lessons to be drawn from the corpus of sexual historiography. Unsympathetic readings of the sexual past always flourish, and tend to be broad and tenacious. The Victorians, despite some recent hot competition from the inhabitants of 1950s suburbia, remain our favourite embodiments of sexual hypocrisy.

We seem compelled to reheat those false but comforting stories of their ignorance and bad faith in order to feel the warm glow of moral superiority. The one about them covering up their piano legs for decency’s sake – a 19th-century joke about American prudery transmuted into a historical factoid in the 1920s – has been given new and undeserved life by Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories books. That one about Queen Victoria refusing to believe in the existence of lesbians – a myth that goes back no further than the 1970s – turned up this year in a book by the historian Lucy Worsley. The persistence of such fictions ought to act as a warning about how the story of our own times may be told.

We, actors in the culture that produced digital upskirting, the private browsing function and Ashley Madison, should beware the unsympathetic assessment of those who will come after us. The evidence against us is mounting. Judgement is waiting. It’s hard to look into the future and guess who in our present moment will be celebrated as we now celebrate Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde, but I think we know those figures who will never make it to that as-yet-unwritten roll of honour.

Suggested reading

Test article

By Douglas Murray

It won’t be self-identifying, non-rapist Brett Kavanaugh, using college football stats to certify his virtue. It won’t be Harvey Weinstein, accepting arrest while clutching a biography of the disgraced-but-somewhat-forgiven movie director Elia Kazan. It won’t be Sir Christopher Chope MP, who acted for whatever reason to preserve, temporarily, the right of British men to forage surreptitious snaps of women’s underwear, wherever it is worn on the Circle Line.

It won’t be the current occupant of the White House, crowing about how “they” – some faceless, undifferentiated stockpile of female adults – never resist the progress of his fun-size celebrity fingers. Nor, I suspect, will it be Julian Assange, who, rather than face the women who made charges against him in Sweden, has chosen to sue the people who bring takeaway up to his bedroom.

Men like this may make history, but they tend not to write it. They’re not sufficiently observant or reflective. Nonetheless the snail-trail of their actions and utterances will be all over the story of this period in human sexuality. Whatever we say, whatever we do, they besmirch us already. Even if we point a finger, and name the stain.

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Why woke keyboard warriors should respect their elders

Julie Bindel — Wed, 24 Oct 2018 09:16:41 +0000

The heated debate on the Gender Recognition Act has highlighted the oft-stark division between generations of feminists. Many of the younger women, especially those in universities, appear to have adopted the line that second wave feminists such as myself, who focus on violence against women and an end to sexist stereotyping, are old-hat. It seems a particular group of very young, privileged, ‘intersectional’ women are prepared to throw away the gains us older feminists achieved.

A Twitter spat last week between myself and Ash Sarkar – a 26-year-old ‘super-woke’ commentator – put this gulf in sharp relief. Sarkar, who had five minutes of fame when she shouted at Piers Morgan on live TV, “I am literally a communist, you idiot”, had tweeted about the proposed changes to the GRA, claiming that the introduction of “self-identification” would not have any effect whatsoever on the rights of others.

Further reading

The Left has forgotten what feminism looks like

By Julie Bindel

I replied: “Unless you are a female in prison of course, one of the most disenfranchised groups on the planet”. It was a reference to the hideous case of Karen White, the transgender sex offender who was placed in a female prison and went on to sexually assault two female inmates.

Sarkar’s response, befitting of the new wave feminists who have learned their politics via social media, was to tweet an image of a Twitter search that had yielded no results. “What a surprise”, she tweeted, “These anti-trans bigots don’t actually care about women in prison, unless it serves their agenda to exclude trans people from public life.”

What a surprise.

These anti-trans bigots don’t actually care about women in prison, unless it serves their agenda to exclude trans people from public life. pic.twitter.com/LkCDPEXD5Y

— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) October 19, 2018

Sarkar, a senior editor at media platform Novaramedia, did not even attempt a Google search, or a quick glance at my Wikipedia page to double check whether or not I actually might indeed ‘care’ about incarcerated women. If she had, she would have learned that I am the founder of Justice for Women – a campaign I began in 1990, two years before Sarkar was born – and have helped countless abused women get out of prison. These young keyboard warriors who do their so-called ‘activism’ online might want to recognise the material change, and numerous benefits, that us older feminists fought for and won.

The ageism of some of these new feminists is outrageous. Take Paris Lees, who has taken aim at feminists over the age of 30. Lees, who is transgender, has written that feminists who dare to criticise extreme transgender ideology are: “A bunch of boring, middle-class, middle-aged people arguing about who is ‘right’”. In an interview for i-D magazine, Lees describes us feminists who do not believe men can become women as “miserable has-beens or never-weres.”

Further reading

Gender preference has no place on a birth certificate

By Meghan Murhpy

I have lost count of the number of times I have been referred to as a ‘dinosaur’ for arguing that men can’t become women or that the sex trade is not empowering. I have seen countless examples of similar ageist and misogynistic abuse of older women such as feminist icon, Germain Greer. As one privileged Cambridge student wrote, Greer is “just an old, white woman”.

When a group of lesbian campaigners protested the transgender takeover at London Pride this year, the gay press and the organisers went into overdrive, accusing the women of bigotry and hate speech. Weeks later, at Manchester Pride, there were loud cheers when the gay male MC announced that the protesters should have been dragged off by their “saggy tits”.

It is unbelievably offensive and hypocritical of women who call themselves ‘feminist’ to accuse older women of being ‘past it’ – from witch-burning to Hollywood casting, isn’t this slur something that feminists have long been united in fighting against? How do they do not see that this is blatant misogyny? Perhaps because it is extreme identity politics, not the liberation of all women, that these super-woke digital agitators are fighting for.

view comments

Why the transbullies are a threat to us all

Julie Bindel — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 12:45:33 +0000

In recent years, the establishment has shown an increasing willingness to capitulate to the transgender lobby. I’m all for supporting much-abused minorities, but the loudest voices in the current debate around transgender rights is a cabal of bullying censors demanding nothing less than blind loyalty and total obedience. Under its vociferous pressure, local and central government, universities, the NHS, and even the police, are hell-bent on silencing anyone who might dare offend the trans-Taliban.

Even West Yorkshire police appear to be under their cosh. Last week, a verbal harassment warning was issued to Graham Linehan, the co-creator of the sitcom Father Ted, for pointing out that the transwoman Stephanie Hayden was biologically male, and tweeting her two previous male names – a practice known in the transgender universe as “deadnaming”. Even though, in the course of their spat, Hayden had posted details of Linehan’s wife’s company on Twitter, she still considered herself to be the aggrieved party.

At the heart of their dispute is the Government’s proposed amendments to the Gender Recognition Act which, if passed, would allow men to self-identify as women. Those who have raised questions about the issues, as Linehan did, or expressed moderate concern about for example, access to same-sex spaces, have found themselves vilified. Best not mention Karen White, the transgender inmate of an all-female prison who admitted to sexually assaulting other women within days of being incarcerated.

Suggested reading

Gender preference has no place on a birth certificate

By Meghan Murphy

Hayden, who is pursuing civil proceedings against Linehan, having accused him of harassment, defamation and misuse of private information, said that she had spent five hours giving a statement to police. That’s five hours of police time, plus the paperwork involved, and for what? For describing a person with XY chromosomes as “he”.

It’s not just the police who have joined the woke Stasi. The Scottish Government launched the poster campaign One Scotland, warning that “hate crimes” will not be tolerated and that anyone “perpetrating hate” towards disabled, lesbian, gay, and transgender people will be reported. Of course hate crime should be prosecuted, but in today’s climate, this could mean being prosecuted for calling a transgender, though biological male,”he”. It’s the same in our universities. Even neutral investigation of the issues, disinterested academic speech, and differing views are being silenced and howled down.

Suggested reading

When did women's rights stop being human rights?

By Jo Bartosch

Perhaps, given the prevailing McCarthyite climate on our campuses, we shouldn’t be quite so shocked by the case of James Caspian. He is a gender identity clinician, and the trustee of a charity that works to help transgender and transsexual people. He had heard from other gender specialists about the growing numbers of female-to-male transsexuals who wished to revert to being female, despite having undergone life-changing surgery. Caspian decided to write his thesis on de-transitioning, and submitted a proposal on the subject to Bath Spa University as part of his Masters degree.

The proposal was rejected by the university’s ethics committee because it could be deemed ‘politically incorrect’, and that such research might “offend” trans people by highlighting the fact that some people regret undergoing sex-change surgery.

Here then is another eulogy for that once prized ideal that universities exist to encourage discussion, research, and to challenge out-of-date ideas. When Caspian complained, he was told the university’s decision was justified because his research could provoke “unnecessary offence” and “attacks on social media”.

Caspian is now crowdfunding online in order to fight the case.

From the same author

Who let the thought police invade our universities?

By Julie Bindel

Similarly supine responses to the bullying have extended to the workplace. Ken Zucker headed the Toronto-based child, youth and family gender identity clinic at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) for more than 30 years. He was sacked in 2015 following claims that he had “practiced conversion therapy” on children that identified as transgender, because he advised parents to “watch and wait” before opting for hormone blockers or other invasive treatment. CAMH launched an external review as a result of complaints, and on the day it was published – without consulting Zucker – fired him. Earlier this month, Zucker received a public apology and a substantial pay-out from CAMH.

The shutting down of the debate is ramping up, as the need for discussion becomes more urgent. Earlier this month, an event organised by Women’s Place UK to discuss proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act was cancelled by Leeds City Council with less than three hours’ notice after complaints from trans activists. Merseyside mayor, Joe Anderson, last month used his packed council chamber to make an impassioned speech denouncing ReSisters, a feminist group which opposes mixed-sex toilets in public buildings.

Further reading

Test article

By Peter Franklin

Have we forgotten why we need to debate these policies? Shouldn’t we be examining all aspects of the impact the legislation would have on half of the population if it were passed? The changes proposed are far from uncontroversial, and will have real material effects. Discussion of them (as with any proposed change to the law) is what the legislative process is all about.

Making immediate concessions to the bullying eliminates the chance of any rigorous investigation into the evidence taking place. It also grants one group legislative superiority over the rights of any others. It is governance based on who shouts the loudest. Apart from putting lives at risk, it also sets a terrible precedent for other bullies and ideologically driven pressure groups. Police, governments, places of work and learning need to be able to stand up for rights, not illogical and dangerous rhetoric. Otherwise democracy loses. And that should concern more than half of the population.

Further reading

Don't be so quick to laugh at the 'grievance study' hoax

By Tom Chivers

view comments

Gender preference has no place on a birth certificate

Meghan Murphy — Mon, 24 Sep 2018 05:45:08 +0000

A bill that will allow individuals who identify as “non-binary” to replace the sex listed on their birth certificate with an ‘X’ was cleared last week by New York City Council. City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who introduced the legislation alongside Mayor Bill de Blasio, said this “will make New York birth certificates more inclusive for all and will send a powerful signal to the world that New York City government works for everyone”.

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

Further reading

When did women's rights stop being human rights?

By Jo Bartosch

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading

The Left has forgotten what feminism looks like

By Julie Bindel

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

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

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

More from this author

How have we let scientific study become hate speech?

By Meghan Murphy

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

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

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

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

view comments

How the powerful are perverting the truth

Graeme Archer — Fri, 21 Sep 2018 11:03:09 +0000

In addition to reporting hate crime, please report non-crime hate incidents, which can include things like offensive or insulting comments, online, in person or in writing. Hate will not be tolerated in South Yorkshire. Report it and put a stop to it #HateHurtsSY pic.twitter.com/p2xf6OLoQZ

— South Yorkshire Police (@syptweet) September 9, 2018

This tweet from the South Yorkshire constabulary – to which we’ll return – reminded me of something I wrote for a scientific journal in 1996:

“Most of us are critical realists, in that we believe the Universe exists and that we can learn something about its mechanisms by measuring observable phenomena.”

At the time that felt uncontroversial; now it makes me laugh aloud. Not because I no longer believe in the Universe, or the importance of using language as precisely as possible to describe it, in order to produce valid conclusions about the laws that govern (biological, psychological, cultural) existence. I laugh because I no longer believe that “most of us” think any such thing.

“Most of us” – most of those with power, anyway, about whom I’m most concerned – “most of us” seem to believe that the Universe exists only as an extension of our own desires, and that its reality is nothing more than anything we care to assert at any given moment in time.

To such pathologically subjective people – path-subs, let’s call them – simply to declare “This is a fact” is sufficient to turn “this” into a fact; no more evidence about the nature of “this” is required, and any evidence that is produced, which appears to contradict the claim, can – and must – be dismissed out of hand.

Further reading

Bezos and his offensive, self-serving philanthropy

By James Bloodworth

Once you accept that powerful people and institutions have adopted this path-sub worldview, then a lot of what at first seems crazy about modern life begins to make sense.

Don’t believe the world is round? Just say “The world is flat”, and pancake-like it becomes. Look what happened to Angelos Sofocleous when he tweeted “Women don’t have penises”: hounded from the philosophy magazine he edited. (Let’s take a second to note the delicious, beautiful irony of Mr Sofocleous’s name.)

You can dismiss the suffering of Sofocleous as mere student idiocy. Until you remember the British state’s definition of hate crime:

“Any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice, based on a person’s disability or perceived disability; race or perceived race; or religion or perceived religion; or sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation or transgender identity or perceived transgender identity.”

The Crown Prosecution Service, from whose site I’ve copied that definition, goes on to say:

“There is no legal definition of hostility so we use the everyday understanding of the word which includes ill-will, spite, contempt, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment and dislike.”

I’ve bolded the overt insertions of path-sub thinking in those definitions. For a hate crime to be committed, it’s sufficient for me to assert that it has. End of debate. I don’t even require to have witnessed the incident to which I’ve decided to apply the label. And that criminal offence itself might have been motivated by “unfriendliness”. Remember that, the next time you stand on my foot on the tube, and don’t return my friendly greeting.

To be clear: I’m temperamentally opposed to the concept of hate crime, since to my boring old Tory mind it is the crime that matters, not its motivation. Ian Baynham died from the kicking he received from a pack of homophobic scum; Alan Greaves was battered to death by non-homophobic scum. The deaths of Ian and Alan don’t weigh differently, to my mind. I couldn’t care less about the motives of their attackers.

However, I can accept that society might take a different view. I can see why its politics might say, “The motivation for some crimes is so abhorrent that we label them as hateful and judge their protagonists especially harshly.” You and I can disagree about this; nothing bad would follow.

But the path-sub perversion of the hate crime definition does matter, because it distorts reality. It leaves the critical realist – the man or woman who requires evidence to back-up assertions about the state of things – at the mercy of the path-sub activist, who can change reality (“That was a hate crime”) at the tap of a keyboard. And once we grant permission to the path-subs to create the reality in which we all have to live, we are at their mercy.

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Free Minds: Doctor Who, a maverick in time and space

By Graeme Archer

Especially in South Yorkshire? Before pushing the path-sub envelope with that interesting take on hate crime, exemplified by our opening quote, South Yorkshire constabulary turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse of hundreds of South Yorkshire girls, over a period of years. Professor Alexis Jay, who investigated this atrocity, concluded that police “gave no priority to child sexual abuse, regarded many victims with contempt and failed to act on their reports of abuse”.

This, um, flexible approach to applying path-sub rules about hate crime strikes people as bizarre. South Yorkshire police want to know if you’ve done anything mildly unpleasant; that same force declined to investigate the objectively hateful. Similarly, you can be arrested for saying “Excuse me, do you realise that your horse is gay?”, but the Metropolitan police won’t lift a finger while you subject a Conservative MP’s children to what anyone reasonable would call vicious psychological abuse. Even if they’re standing next to you while you do it.

Isn’t that a contradiction? Surely, think Tories and liberals across the centre-Right spectrum, surely this obvious contradiction will cause the whole path-sub house of cards to collapse?

Dream on, matey. The contradiction isn’t a problem; it’s an inherent and deliberate attribute of the path-sub architecture. While old-fashioned types like myself worry about the incoherent stances adopted by various institutions in hock to path-sub thinking, the path-sub activist rejoices at our confusion. Path-sub politicians and activists couldn’t be happier that I’ve spent a few hours trying to unravel their contradictory ideas: that’s two hours a Conservative didn’t spend rallying the electoral base to fight back. That’s two hours when they were out there, bending reality to their will.

From universities, to our criminal justice systems, to our politics. Path-sub is the mindset of the Corbynite – you can see their spiteful toddler “deductions” all over social media: “Because all Tories are evil, there is no level of abuse to which they cannot be subjected.”

This week, Rupa Huq, a Labour MP from west London tweeted an image of the gates at Downing Street:

They rejected calls to create nationwide ones outside abortion clinics but Tories *do* support buffer zones to protect *some* women… Thatcher had these gates erected in 1980s now Theresa “my way or the highway” May lives in splendid isolation behind them pic.twitter.com/a8mTXXrNo4

— Rupa Huq MP (@RupaHuq) September 18, 2018

The gates, of course, were put in place to protect our democracy from terrorist attacks. Let’s not forget Rupa Huq’s party leader’s interesting history with regard to the progenitors of some of those terrorist campaigns, for example being arrested at a demo organised to show sympathy for the Brighton bombers.

Huq knows this. She knows that you know that she knows this. But neither the grotesquely offensive nature of her tweet, nor the overt rewriting of history by a former sociology lecturer matters a damn. Huq says: (Female) Tories have gates to protect their splendid isolation, and that becomes the truth.

Everything real is contingent to the path-sub’s political desire. If reality is contingent then the truth is subjective, or, more accurately, the “truths” are subjective, from which it follows they can be put into a rank order.

Truth A – that Thatcher had security gates installed because terrorists were trying to kill her – can be held in the hands of path-sub MPs, and measured against Truth B – that Thatcher was a Tory, Tories hate and fear the people, so Thatcher installed gates to keep the virtuous mob from the door. Guess which “truth” the Corbynite university lecturers are whispering in the ears of your children.

By the same author

If you don't 'get' statistics it's just as bad as not 'getting' Shakespeare

By Graeme Archer

Back in 1996, I wrote that we can’t understand the universe, in any useful way, without accepting that it exists beyond our consciousness. Throughout my adult life I’ve believed that words matter, as they are our thoughts made (metaphorical) flesh, and so are also real objects in that same universe they are attempting to describe. Words are real things, with power.

Increasingly, and terrifyingly, only the last sentence of that paragraph holds water. Words have power, all right, but their actual meaning (define “hate crime”) no longer matters. Facts don’t matter. Biology doesn’t matter. History doesn’t matter. The truth is whatever the pathologically subjective declares it to be.

Such wordcrime is strong enough to destroy institutions (see our police service and universities for details). Liberals and Conservatives must stop ignoring this. What would happen, for example, were a pathologically subjective Corbyn-led government to assert that “There’s no such thing as a good Conservative”? What reality do you imagine would follow from that?

By the same author

Why does the Left hate gay Tories?

By Graeme Archer

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The Left has forgotten what feminism looks like

Julie Bindel — Mon, 10 Sep 2018 08:54:10 +0000

You should be able to rely on the Left to be on the side of the feminists.

After all, socialism is supposedly about true egalitarianism. And as a lifelong campaigner for women’s liberation, I am well aware that male Leftists think of themselves as feminist allies.

Conservatism, on the other hand, is not so friendly towards us. It often favours a commitment to so-called traditional values and ideas, isn’t so keen about change. And let’s not talk about Thatcher – she was certainly no feminist. She was a classic example of a certain type of right-wing woman who espouses the view that women are to blame for holding themselves back; it’s not the patriarchy’s fault, and they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps as she had done.

And yet, in recent years, I have experienced far more direct sexism from these so-called feminist ‘socialist’ men than Tory ones. When they speak about fighting for equality, more-often-than-not they mean ‘among men’. They are actively supporting activities and industries that harm women and girls. They are calling feminists bigots and they are waving the flag for fundamentalist religion.

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Why are so many left-wing progressives silent about Islam's totalitarian tendencies?

By Julie Bindel

Do I exaggerate? Let’s look at a perfect example of the shift in attitude on the Left, as epitomised by the new brand of hard-left brocalists that surfaced with Corbyn’s cabal.

Owen Jones, a hard-left journalist, campaigner, and one who should attacking the exploitation of women, is a classic example of the socialist hypocrites I’m talking about. In an  article for the Guardian back in 2015, the Corbynista poster boy defended a serving member of Parliament, Simon Danczuk, who was exposed as a prolific pornography consumer.

And yet, only a month earlier, Jones had lectured other men about why they should do more for feminism. In the article defending Danczuk’s use of porn, Jones also criticised the fact that three judges had been dismissed from their positions because they “watch(ed) porn on the job”. They had, he said, been “publicly embarrassed and dismissed”. Instead of recognising that pornography directly harms women and girls, Jones sided with the male public servants who were enjoying women being exploited instead of doing their jobs.

He’s not alone in this view. His Leftist chums in the Labour leadership agree with him about the rights of men to consume women through pornography and prostitution. Corbyn and John McDonnell  both  believe in decriminalised pimping, brothel owning and sex buying – all in the name of women’s liberation, of course.

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Slaying dragons: Corbynism and its cabal of thugs

By Julie Bindel

Jones is also notorious for  lecturing  women about who actually  has the right  to decide who is female or not; he regularly berates anyone who dares suggest that people with penises are not actually women. In one of his  articles, he declared that the group of people he terms ‘transphobes’ (who refuse to accept men as women) will be consigned to the “wrong side of history” for their views.

This wasn’t how it used to be. Remember Tony Blair? Hard-line Leftists may despise him, but many feminists did not. He was the one who introduced women-only shortlists in order to successfully address some of the massive imbalances in parliament. What has the great socialist leader Corbyn done? Decided that the base-line criteria for being included on a women-only shortlist is to have self-identified as a woman

There is no clearer way to dominate and disenfranchise women than to insist that we don’t even know what one is!

The Tories, on the other hand, no longer the reactionaries of old, are more open to the idea that women are full, equal citizens than those macho Momentum types who act like thugs around female MPs who refuse to toe the hard-left line.

As the typical Leftist male gets his boxers in a twist, crowing his support for everything from stripping to legal brothels, the Conservative Human Rights Commission is holding an urgent enquiry  into the harms of the sex trade. Meanwhile, the kerfuffle over men who define as women being allowed on all-female shortlists is being challenged by men writing for right-of-centre publications.

Further reading

Can we reform our rancid political debate?

By Douglas Murray

Even stranger, though, is the Left’s new attitude towards religious fundamentalism. Once the Left baulked at the idea of hardline religious doctrine because of the inherent misogyny and homophobia. Not any more. Now the political Left is full of men defending the ‘right’ of women to be covered in a full-face veil in the name of modesty but some on the Right are respectfully challenging.

I do think this shift has come about as Leftist men have latched on to a distortion of feminism that is all about individual ‘empowerment’, and nothing to do with challenging male power. This ‘fun feminism’, in which baking cupcakes and pole dancing are deemed liberating, lets woke dudes off the hook.

But as far as I’m concerned, if men like a particular brand of feminism, it means it is not working. And it is hardly surprising that there are certain men would rather cheer on the idea of a woman walking around in a basque rather than dungarees; men who prefer the ‘slut’ marches to the angry Reclaim the Night demonstrations. Rebrand feminism so that men are no longer threatened, and everyone’s happy. Except the actual feminists that is.

It seems to me that when it comes to feminism, and defending the rights of women to live as equal citizens, the categories of Left and Right don’t imply what they used to. Politics has been turned on its head. Let’s face it, if Corbyn and his henchmen believe that it’s fine and dandy for a man to decide he is a woman, and shout ‘bigot’ at those of us that refuse to accept this madness, we may as well go to the Tories for a little old-fashioned courtesy.

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How have we let scientific study become hate speech?

Meghan Murphy — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 10:53:24 +0000

Academic studies and public debate should not be narrowly determined by those committed to the ideologies in question

Further reading

When did women's rights stop being human rights?

By Jo Bartosch

Further reading

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

By Julie Bindel

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

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

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

Further reading

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

By Owl Fisher

Those who dare question the concept of gender identity itself are treated as blasphemers and bigots, viciously harassed, attacked, and even fired

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