Jonathan Ross has had his mind changed about transphobia.
The lad was doing so well. In a debate from which most public figures run a mile, Jonathan Ross had bravely put his head above the parapet. When the comedy writer Graham Linehan and, more recently, JK Rowling came under siege from the militant trans lobby for the crime of speaking scientific truth, Ross had rallied to their side, rejecting any suggestion that either was transphobic.
Naturally, a torrent or two of the abuse directed at Linehan and Rowling then started to head the way of Ross. But he stood firm, seemingly willing to take the brickbats.
That was until Monday, at which point he performed a reverse-ferret and informed us that he had come to accept that he was, after all, “not in a position to decide what is or isn’t transphobic”. A pretty spectacular climbdown, by anyone’s estimation.
So what lay behind this change of heart? Well, Ross revealed that he had spoken to his daughters about the issue, leaving us in no doubt that it was their intervention which had prompted his volte-face.
Those who know me will concede I try to be thoughtful & not a dick.Having talked to some people(OK,my daughters)re my earlier tweet,I’ve come to accept that I’m not in a position to decide what is or isn’t considered transphobic. It’s a wildly sensitive subject.Let’s keep talking
— Jonathan Ross (@wossy) June 8, 2020
It’s unlikely the doughty women campaigning to defend their sex-based rights against the demands of the more extreme wing of the trans movement will be deterred by this sudden turnabout of their fairweather friend. They have already shown themselves more than capable of pursuing their cause without much in the way of celebrity endorsement.
Ross’s capitulation, though, does point to a wider trend of parents who seem only too willing to defer to their offspring on the contentious social and political issues of the day. It’s a trend that dovetails with the more general fetishisation of youth that has become such a feature of our society.
We see it in the veneration of Greta Thunberg. We see it in the campaign for ‘Votes at 16’. We saw it with Brexit in the depiction of young Remainers as tolerant and enlightened in contrast to old Leavers who were bigoted ‘gammon’. We see it in the turmoil at the New York Times, whose owners caved in to ‘sensitive’ young staffers demanding the resignation of the editorial director because — capital offence, this — he ran a piece by someone they didn’t like and to whose words they took exception.
It seems that, for some, the young are right simply by dint of their being young — almost as though to be a teenager or 20-something is to be imbued with a unique insight and wisdom denied to everyone else. Yet there is no logical reason to routinely ascribe to the young these kinds of attributes, so why do it?
One answer might be that as the agenda of woke liberalism becomes ever more narrow and exclusive, its high priests must focus on consolidating support among the sections of society where it is most likely to hold appeal. Broadly, that means courting the young and ‘progressive’ over the older, more traditional voter. Then, so far as there is any chance of popularising such an agenda, it must be done by appeals to the sagacity and vision of its proponents, rather than asserting the merits of the agenda itself (which, as its cheerleaders surely know, will always prove unattractive to large chunks of the electorate). And if that doesn’t work, well, why not try to gerrymander the entire system by driving down the voting age?
None of this is to argue that the young should be seen and not heard, nor to suggest they be discouraged from political activity. On the contrary, much better a next generation — whatever its views — which is politically conscious and engaged rather than one content to hide away in the bedroom and immerse itself in a world of online gaming.
It is, however, to make the case that putting the young on a pedestal and assuming they always know best does nothing to help society find solutions to increasingly complex social and political questions. Neither, in the end, does it do youngsters themselves any favours, for in denying them the opportunity to have their arguments scrutinised and tested in robust debate, we leave them woefully unprepared for the competitive world they are about to encounter. It is surely no surprise that this tendency to grant excessive indulgence to the views of the young has coincided with the slow erosion of free speech on university campuses and the emergence of such sinister concepts as ‘safe spaces’, ‘trigger warnings’ and no-platforming.
This undue deference also fails to recognise what we all know: the worldview of the young will often shift as they grow older and find themselves navigating a world of marriages, mortgages and children. Rare is the person who believes at 45 everything he believed at 16. With the long passage of time, in fact, it is likely that the child will adopt the position of the parent on a range of social and political issues – positions that he might once have regarded as antediluvian and reactionary. It calls to mind the reported words of Mark Twain: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”
We have enough division within our society at present without exacerbating the generational tension that was ignited in the aftermath of the EU referendum and continues to simmer today. Setting young against old by constantly portraying the former as all that is good and moral, and assuming they will have the answers to all life’s problems, while dismissing the latter as unreconstructed dinosaurs will do nothing to bring a rapprochement.
The young should be treated as equals in the arena of public debate. No more, no less. The cult status conferred upon them by some is misplaced and patronising.
Oh, and Jonathan Ross should have stuck to his guns.
Paul Embery is a firefighter, trade union activist, pro-Brexit campaigner and ‘Blue Labour’ thinker
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SubscribeVery good sense from Paul, as always. I followed politics and world affairs etc quite closely from the age of seven or eight and was vastly more informed than most of my contemporaries as a teenager and into my 20s – yet looking back I shudder to think how little I really knew. In my opinion the voting age should be raised to about 25, but only to those who have paid at least two years of taxes.
Paul does offer some hope in his suggestion that the woke are forced to target an ever younger group of unformed minds because nobody with any life experience believes all their nonsense, but I’m not sure that I share that hope.
The brain continues to develop until it is about twenty-five years old.
I’m not convinced that we can justify raising the voting age that far (much as I’d like to), but twenty-one (as it was until Harold Wilson enfranchised a disproportionate number of supporters of his own party) seems a reasonable compromise.
Demographically Paul should be correct, except for the fact that 37% of the workforce are in the Public Sector and, almost by definition, are contaminated from the outset.
Frankly FB, with an above average brain, (AA), combined with your social and political antennae finely tuned from the age of seven, (1973?) I’m surprise at your optimism.
To enter the Roman Senate as a Quaestor you were supposed to be twenty four. Today, due to congenital decay, I would now raise the minimum voting age to thirty and similar to you, expect individuals to have paid at least nine years of direct taxation.
Those without the benefit of an AA brain, would thus not fritter their time away at some sink-hole university or on expensive substance abuse, woke nonsense and the like. Perhaps they would even set to work?
I’m afraid it’s even more sinister than it looks. Ross has not been persuaded that his views are wrong, he has been silenced. It’s the modern currency in identity politics of closing down all opposing points of view because ‘you’ are not ‘one of us’ therefore you ‘don’t get it’. Not only do you not ‘get it’ but you shouldn’t even attempt to discuss it, you should just automatically concede the ground to others. Note his choice of words: “I’m not in a position to decide what is or isn’t considered (insert controversial subject of choice)”. Sinister indeed. The young are destroying freedom of speech in the name of inclusivity by excluding anything that challenges their orthodoxy.
I think that, in most contexts, ‘Jonathan Ross has been silenced’ would be one of the pleasantest sentences one could read. Maybe not this one, though.
I agree with you, Julia! He has bowed to the pressure of his daughters… possibly for a quiet family life.
I’ve seen this happen with my own extended family, when the grandchildren tell the grandparents that their opinions (on life, but especially on Brexit) should take second place because the future is not theirs to shape.
I’ve had it happen to me when the same opinionated people tell me that my political situation regarding self-id and trans issues is wrong, bigoted and I am being unreasonable by excluding trans women from single sex situations.
The inability to think that… perhaps… 50+ years of experience with men and life might give me an insight that they haven’t got yet never enters into their mind.
Ah, for the gauche self-confidence of youth!
I am awfully tired of people like Daniel Radcliffe, Eddie Redmayne and now Jonathan Ross telling me what a woman is and is not. The whole feminist movement in the 70s and 80s was about making he world recognise that our potential and our personalities have nothing to do with our bodies. There are as many ways of inhabiting the female body as there are women. But it IS the body and the genes which create it which define our sex. For women, whether or not we choose or are able to bear children, that is our biological point. To these men who tell me a woman is something other than a female body, I ask what exactly? Define a woman. I have never heard a satisfactory definition from the trans lobby. It is profoundly reactionary to say that there is a female personality, a set of tastes and traits and feelings, which defines a woman rather than ovaries and a vagina. It takes us back to the fifties. I remember reading Jan Morris’s account of his/her transition. One passage in particular struck me, an account of a final experience as a man. She writes that she felt a lightness running down a hillside, a feeling she expected never to feel again once her body became female. I have news for her. I’m a woman and I’ve always had the same feeling she had as a man. Doesn’t make me a man. Although by the logic of the trans lobby, if feelings dictate sex, not bodies, then I’ve been a man all along, even though I’m a mother and grandmother. It’s all absolutely nuts!
Jan Morris is a fine writer (loved the book on Venice, written when still James) and a compassionate soul. Now in her nineties and a voice from another, now vanishing, era. What must she make of the current lunacy and intolerance? It would be good to hear from her, but I wouldn’t blame her if she wants to keep well out of the madness.
a wider trend of parents who seem only too willing to defer to their offspring on the contentious social and political issues of the day.
You can keep me out of that trend thank you-as the father of 2 unbelievably woke daughters (both University students & at home due to the cowardice of their Educational Establishments) I take great delight in informing them that our house is and will remain a bastion of free speech and they have no “right not to be offended”.I am more than happy to listen to what they have to say but they also have to listen to me-there are no safe spaces in our home!
I also remind them regularly that as they are net beneficiaries of the tax system at this stage of their lives,they should think carefully before advocating any spend/tax policies.
To be fair sometimes they can make me reconsider but its not often-the lack of substantive facts is alarming-eldest announced she had donated (my!) money to a BLM chariry-I dutifully asked what the objectives of the charity where and would she also be demonstrating in support of the Uighers in Cinese re-education camps!Silence.
They will learn but for now-its mostly posturing.
Excellent. I too, am deeply embarrassed by the simplistic views that I held in my youth.
Agreed. The tragedy is that so many people cling to these identical – simplistic and naive – views for their entire lives. Blighting current and future generations without a hint of shame.
It’s not simply the simplistic nature of what I held in my youth that I find embarrassing, it was the arrogance and total certainty with which I held them. Sometimes remembering specific examples, I still blush with shame.
Well said. I am the same. But to suggest that I was a damned fool to my own teens now somehow doesn’t cut it. Strange eh?
I’m just glad we didn’t have social media when I was a teenager.
What is both remarkable and terrifying is the extent to which politics and ‘issues’ currently dominate the lives of the young. I can recall perhaps one minor political discussion in the sixth form and hardly anything at college. We were exposed to a couple of leftie General Studies teachers on my advertising course but we just ignored them and didn’t even discuss their attempts to influence us. Outside of that, nothing.
I voted in a student election at University just twice. Once because a friend was standing and once because a candidate came around the cafeteria dressed as a giant rabbit and handed out sweets. Doing science degrees that actually required a significant amount of time in lecture hall and lab didn’t leave time for political activism, even if we wanted to. I suspect the same holds true today.
Sorry to say its creeping in fast. A science university advertised for an qualified person. The advert was rejected by the department because it did not give enough reference to diversity, inclusiveness and colour. This had to be utmost when selecting from any candidates regardless of their scientific qualifications and experience
With age, comes wisdom (hopefully). My politics have changed dramatically over time along with pretty much every other belief and opinion. I blame hormones and finances. Let’s add to youthful passion and enthusiasm some age driven sagacity.
Thank you well for a much a very needed voice and thinking
in an age of rage unthinking self righteousness- anger and persecution of anyone who holds or dares to think something different.We live in very persecutory times- not too far away from the witch hunts of the medieval period- How, with this as the back ground, is any kind of thinking and change to come about of minds and hearts, as well as structurally, if everyone is wrong who doesn’t hold the views of the dominant hysterical and paranoid opinions and actions of really only a minority, and the majority become afraid to speak, let alone think, we are in the asylum
People have spent 65 years asking how (while some clearly did) the majority of ordinary, decent Germans did not stand up and speak out against the rise of Nazism. We are learning that right now…
Incidentally, indoctrinating and radicalising the very young was a key strategy.
All good until the end, but why should those with much less experience be treated as _equal_ to those with much more?
Fundamentally it’s the loss of belief in the redemptive aspect of the world and human self-denial. After centuries of being told that it is all the working out of a mechanical process of evolution that spews out and randomly destroys living things for no perceptible reason, they retreat into a sort of consoling childhood fairyland, where no dragons roam, and everybody is ‘nice’. To be alone (as we all finally are in the world) is to them insupportable. To me it has its fleeting compensations.
Once we tacitly ‘accept’ this lie, we will go along with bigger lies. This is how totalitarian regimes are started. Celebrities are being targeted in the hopes of demoralizing and isolating any who dissent from the ‘narrative’.
I think that may the young are missing a few dragons to fight or mountains to climb or jobs to have or futures to look forward to. Remember our news broadcasts and their teachers have told them all this and by the way, you only have 12 years left before the planet becomes uninhabitable. They have been told we have greedily done all the big fun stuff, and used them as pawns and bargaining pieces and excuses for our own poor behaviour and we continually reflect in them our desire to be children ourselves again, and we haven’t even left them their family history to research when they get older. So what they are doing now is reaching into the back of humanity’s toy cupboard to have a play with some of our old and discarded toys we or even our grand parents left behind. We haven’t taught them any real history, which in some schools only seems to stretch back one generation, so they don’t know the consequences other than they see the world around looks pretty ok. Because of all this we feel guilty and over compensate and allow them to tantrum in front of our world leaders or believe that shouting out about a problem is sufficient to actually fix it.
More than that. Todays young lack structure in their lives. They have no challenges to fear or face so they make up their own. Not for them the hard grit of overcomming the effects and hardship of a war the era in the 70,s/80,s when unions ruled with interest rates and inflation at 15%. Not for them the stress of the cold war nuclear weapons and Vietnam. No they choose made up challenges that they think will not result in any danger or discomfort in their lives. I dont think they have chosen wisely
Surely the fall of mankind was caused by Adam/Eve’s (to some ancient Rabbis originally a single hermaphodite creature) lack of innocence and purity. It/They ate from the tree of knowledge. It was its/their wilful desire to usurp the privilege of God that caused it/them to be expelled from Eden. Rousseau appeared to have believed that this world is still Eden, but then couldn’t account satisfactorily for division, strife, violence, pain or any of the other ills of living. The only solution was to blame anyone who refuses to recognise the goodness of the world, as if they caused it to be so awful. This thought tendency underlies all leftist thinking.
One has to feel for a clearly torn Jonathan Ross.
His long crafted ‘Big Kid’ shtick and livelihood in the past has always been heavily predicated on appearing to be ‘down with the kids’, so it’s really no surprise that he ultimately bottled standing by his own ‘out of touch, old man’ opinions.
In this sense, his decision was as much a corporate decision as it was a personal one.