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On International Women’s Day in 2022, Yvette Cooper seemed unable to define a woman: “People get themselves down rabbit holes on this,” she said. “I’m avoiding going down this rabbit hole.” Attempting to distract from this inability, she called for more action on violence against women. Little did she realise that most of us who criticise gender ideology do so on the grounds that allowing men to use female-only spaces leaves women and girls even more vulnerable to men’s violence.
So, either she was being disingenuous, or she doesn’t know what a woman is. Or perhaps she was just doing what many other indulgent parents do and was appeasing her transactivist son. Whatever the answer, it’s unforgivable. She is a public servant.
In the aftermath of the Cass Report into the state of Britain’s youth gender care services, I have little interest in condemning people for stupid things they have said in the past — but I am angry about those who only changed their stance once it becomes unavoidably obvious that they were wrong all along. One obvious candidate is Labour shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting — though, admittedly, he did reposition himself in the months before the Cass Report was published.
In the past, Streeting has resorted to what I call “the Joni Mitchell diversion tactic”, attributing the toxicity of the “debate” to “both sides”. Yet Streeting himself hasn’t always been so even-handed. In 2017, he called for “specialist GPs” to be trained to prescribe “bridging hormones” while patients waited for a referral — a practice starkly at odds with the conclusions of the Cass Report.
Yesterday, though, Streeting hailed Cass’s review as “a really important” piece of work. “[It] does raise some serious concerns that are pretty scandalous. Actually I think we’ve got to ask ourselves: why is it that we’ve seen medical interventions that have been given on the basis of very weak evidence? How is it that clinicians have been silenced for coming forward?”
Really, Wes? You don’t understand how these people — including your own colleague, Rosie Duffield — have also been silenced? Of course he does. But then yesterday, disingenuity was the order of the day. Even Stonewall — that rainbow-resplendent Garden of Eden — was forced to change tack. In its statement about the review, it said: “What is important, above all, is that trans and gender-diverse children get the quality healthcare that they need and deserve. The Cass Review can play a vital role in achieving this aim, if its recommendations are implemented properly.”
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SubscribeIt was ever thus. For Bindel and co., and even the kids who were railroaded into premature and lifechanging decisions, well, others have had it worse.
Perhaps the most significant volte face happened in 1939-40, when it became clear that the appeasers of Hitler had got it catastrophically wrong. This was best illustrated by the 1940 polemic “Guilty Men”, and published when it looked as though the army would be wiped out on the beach at Dunkirk.
In the years that followed, reputations were laundered and memories erased. The chief culprits were the British people, who forgot how they cheered when Chamberlain flew home from Munich with his piece of paper.
Good parallel! See also “climate change” fiasco. In 10-20 years now one will admit to having pushed that nefarious agenda.
It’s a really terrible, indeed hysterical, parallel. What were you thinking?
It’s a common aspect of human nature which takes people down these paths. You would do well to look into human psychology and appreciate that atrocious acts happen all the time because of identity politics and wanting to be ‘on the right side of history’!!! It’s simply a matter of how far it goes. Cancelling/sacking/bullying people today is equivalent to jailing/torturing/murdering people in the future. You are naïve in the extreme!!
You’d do well to avoid black and white thinking and discover some nuance. There are degrees to good and evil. And there are good intentions which turn out badly, and even bad intentions that turn out well.
How does one consider there is any good to the torture chambers and death camps of Nazism and Communism ?
I suggest good intentions which turn out bad are people who are being deceitful about obtaining power. One shall know them by their fruits.
Not Hitler again, please!
Listen to Mr Morley
Thanks Hilary, I groan every time people do this.
The Nazis started their mass killings by murdering mentally handicapped.
Child euthanasia in Nazi Germany – Wikipedia
Don’t blame you for being bitter. Utterly shameless.
Bitter, self righteous and on a very high horse.
Some people just have this talent for making even their allies feel like they might be on the wrong side!
Agreed! And she’d be prettier if she smiled.
I’ll bet my house that your solitary downvote is courtesy of Mr Talius Pervert.
This report won’t be the game changer that many commentators expect. The rise in autism and adhd diagnoses in the UK has been driven by the private sector, not the NHS. Gender affirming care is migrating into the private sector. As long as a substantial cohort of North Americans support it, and people have the money and the inclination to seek it out, ‘gender ideology’ will remain a train without brakes in our globalised health care system.
That seems overly pessimistic. I think it will give a lot of people pause for thought. If not, what do you think is driving the trans phenomena?
I have my own thoughts – I think it’s deeply rooted in the feminist idea that gender is a social construct and that there are no innate differences between boys and girls. It can lead messed up, gender confused children to be seen as little feminist heroes by silly, messed up parents and teachers who have drunk too much of the feminist kool aid.
But I’d be interested in other views on what is driving this. It’s probably not a single thing, but has multiple causes.
I am an old school, second wave feminist. I have always believed that gender was a social construct and that women’s and men’s abilities were largely equal – though I have always accepted that men were useful for heavy lifting. I am not sure there is enough research into what else might be genetic nor whether it is possible to untangle the influence of nature and nurture on all of us. But saying our abilities are equal is not the same as saying that “there are no innate differences between boys and girls”
I do not confuse gender with sex. Sex is real. Sex is binary. Sex is immutable. Men and women are different. Gender is anything you want it to be, so long as you have the imagination and can resist the social conditioning, now an absolute avalanche in social media.
Conditioned gender roles have operated to narrow the options for all of us – but particularly for women – you only need to look at the history of the last 200 years to see evidence of that. The less prescriptive they can be the better for all of us. But the trans activist movement is actually seeking to embed those roles: you can no longer be a sissy boy or a tomboy, you have to change your gender so you appear to be complying with the gender expectations of your apparent sex. And in the case of too many adult trans identified men, they appear as a pastiche of a clichéd woman – all slap and heels! Trans activists are working to embed gender roles, not to liberate them. Give me sissy boys and tomboys any day!
I think you just made my point for me. You just don’t want to accept any responsibility for the outcomes.
As for innate differences (behaviours, preferences and personality more than ability – though some abilities are gendered) there is lots of evidence. Genetic, behavioural, neurological and hormonal. They are not absolutes, or binaries – but nevertheless more than clear.
“Gendering” in the feminist sense is the conflation of innate differences (a female is likely “better” at growing a member of the next generation of humans inside her body, a male is likely able to throw a spear farther and with greater force) with abilities such as cognition, or an ability to hold a position of power with integrity.
In most cultures males have used larger body size, greater physical strength and the impediments of reproduction for females as a means to dominate and exploit.
None of this is invisible or difficult to grasp. This type of “gotcha” is disingenuous and tiresome.
Unlikely. In social mammals generally it is the ability to cooperate, build coalitions and work as a team which leads to social dominance. Where physical strength is the key factor this leads to societies in which single males dominate a harem, while other males are excluded.
It is notable that all team sports were developed by men – because team work and cooperation is absolutely central to male behaviour. Women have been able to copy these sports, but have not spontaneously developed them.
Sports train men for hunting and war. The earliest drawings of sports are Minoan showing boxing and bull jumping. I expect bull jumping was training for boys to be able to jump out of the way of a charging auroch.
The ability to run and throw a spear and hit a moving prey animal requires advanced spatial awareness. It would be interesting to assess how much neural development needed to hit a moving object when one is running can be developed after puberty. Most of the best fighter aces in WW2 shot from a young age. A dog fight is a test of reflexes and spatial awreness.
The same for language, dance, and music. How much is the ability of women to understand languages, dance, music and emotions comes from girls looking after babies.
You can’t have it both ways, e.g.That the sexes are the same and that men and women have some unique qualities that differentiate them. That B.S. helped to get us into this situation in the first place. “saying our abilities are equal is not the same as saying that “there are no innate differences between boys and girls.” Of course we should have equal pay for doing the same jobs and of course we should have equal input in politics as men, jobs in science, tech ,etc, etc. but what the hell does that have to do with our ability to bear children and rear them more caringly GENERALLY than most men. That’s evolution. In the areas of nurturing and violence there stark differences between men and women the WORLD over that no provincial perspective can refute. As far as “nature and nurture” go they are an amalgam and one can trump the other with any extreme factor in either. To deny women’s innate qualities is internalized misogyny by women who consider women’s traits inferior and want to claim male characteristics instead.
Couldn’t agree more with your last sentence! I fear this is part of what is driving the female to male transitions that have escalated over the last decade.
Women on the whole have far better grasp of language and perceiving emotion in others which is beneficial in bringing up babies and young children who are not able to express themselves clearly.
At the risk of generalising from a single datum, my mind on this was made up when my kids, aged two and three, went for their first trip to the zoo. My daughter enthused about the baby lions. When I asked my son what he had seen his eyes lit up and he replied,”A bulldozer!” I have observed similar indicators from children in feminist-inclined households like mine too many times to be in doubt. Gender is not a social construct.
All parents have experienced the same as you, and it’s from a very early age. I think you’d have to be really dogmatic not to have your mind changed by having children. Especially as common experience is so closely backed by research.
To be honest I don’t think the sex/gender split makes a lot of sense – the two are just too obviously interlinked. And they are interlinked across times and cultures. The differences between cultures are usually superficial and sometimes disingenuously presented – warpaint being described as “men wearing makeup” for example.
I’m glad you brought up the sex/gender split. I’ve never been enthusiastic about the term “gender” because I have yet to hear a satisfactory definition of it. How is gender different from ‘sex-role”, understood to be culturally and historically conditioned? A person, of either sex, may embrace their culturally and historically prescribed sex-role, or they may chafe under it, but it is undeniably rooted in biological reality. “Gender”, by seeking to sever the connection between sex-roles, and their biological underpinnings — an impossibility — drains itself of any useful meaning. Instead, “gender” has taken on a quasi-religious meaning whereby a confused young person can choose from literally dozens of available “genders” in some vast celestial gender-market, while being persuaded that this is somehow more important than what’s between their legs.
I remember my 3 year old son chewing his toast into the shape of a pistol and shooting his brother with it.
I remember my sister and I running around the backyard with toy guns shouting “Bang bang, fall down, you’re dead.” So . . .
Your kids had two years and three years respectively for adults to point out baby animals to the girl (assumed destined to be a mother) and mechanical vehicles to the boy (because boys are going to be car mechanics and racing drivers or tractor drivers and presidents of vehicle manufacturing industries).
I was female and my father kept pointing: “look at that building”. He gave me adult books about building for colouring when I was three. Then a “Bayko Building Set” when I was 10: and I started to spend my pocket money on packets of miniature green plastic bay windows. I became an architect: because I didn’t know how to think about being anything else. And assumed that what I really wanted to study, if I had a choice (which I didn’t really feel I had, as I got into trouble if I didn’t do what I was expected to do) would be dismissed. And anyway: psychology interested me because I felt there was something “wrong” with me — not because I was interested in other people: so it must be a bad reason. But later discovered this is the classic reason anyone — male or female — takes up psychology. But architecture enabled me to keep studying a wide range of things, though without any passion for it. And a precocious artistic ability was useful. And environmental psychology is pretty interesting. Having later discovered my father had wanted to be an architect, I realised I’d been living out his dream, not mine.
Sex role conditioning — what used to be called “gender roles” to avoid using the term “sex” — start in the cradle. At birth. Blue or pink? My mother said she’d dressed me in purple.
And when that has been refuted, you’ll retreat to the womb. And when innate differences have been shown to be genetic (already largely the case), what then? Where will your next last bastion be.
Your reasons for believing gender to be socially constructed are ideological – without it your dogma sinks – so you’ll carry on believing whatever the evidence.
I always replied to those who favored nurture over nature: “Plumbing’s different, wiring’s different”
I agree with you, too, and particularly with your last paragraph. The trans movement takes stereotypes to another level: a caricature of the ultra-feminine woman wearing tonnes of make up, high heels, tight-fitting clothing, etc. I am very feminine woman who loves cosmetics, clothes, and pretty shoes, but I can also dress very sensibly especially when walking my two big dogs.
The question that feminists never asked themselves, but really should have is: what if I am wrong? What if the different behaviours of boys and girls are not due to conditioning by the patriarchy but are natural innate differences?
What if I am not freeing children from the tyranny of imposed gender, but am repressing and perverting their natural instincts. Making them ashamed of who they are, guilty for their natural behaviour, and feeling that they are somehow not good enough. In the case of boys, even that they are “toxic”. What if, in my ideological zeal, I am damaging children. And what might the outcome of that be? Confusion, crises of mental health, doubt about one’s identity?
And finally: just how sure am I that gender is a social construct? Just how much evidence is there really for that extreme claim, running as it does against all experience, all common sense and all that we know not only about human beings, but about the animal kingdom as well?
Hi David, given your commitment to maintaining historical sex/gender roles, I hope you encourage any female family you may have to work as peasants, prostitites, miners (banned in the UK the same time as children), mill and factory workers, weavers, brewers (“of small ale”), washerwomen, dairy maids, domestic servants, military nurses, farmers, housekeepers to the better off, or any of the other physically demanding manual jobs that women did for millenia before feminism.
And I’m sure they’d be much happier in the roles above than working as doctors, lawyers and managers.
On the limits of female violence, I assume you also ensure your female relatives are also in charge of wringing the chicken’s neck before Sunday lunch and dispatching one of the bunnies kept in the back yard for meat and fur when required?
Because women’s roles through history firmly are not tethered to 1950s aspirational magazine ads.
I’m from a mining background. I know working class history. Nobody in my family had much experience of the fantasy fifties you describe. But equally none of them were so half asleep as to think there were no innate differences between girls and boys.
You’re simply strawmanning.
What proportion of modern women do that, do you suppose? Just the privileged few. The majority of people in those jobs, male or female were privately educated.
While working class women work unfulfilling, low paid jobs just to make ends meet. It really galls when posh feminists use the success of the few as justification for the dead end roles of the many.
Once upon a time the political aim of the left was to free women from such drudgery, through the “single living wage”.
What proportion of modern women do that, do you suppose? Just the privileged few”
While you had a point about innate sex and gender differences, you’ve missed it entirely with that nonsense. Look at the sex ratio in most any law or medical schools today. More than 50% of students are female and have been for many years now.
You’re making a statistic error. The proportion of women who are doctors, and the proportion of doctors who are women are two totally different things.
There is no such thing as gender. It’s without meaning.
I married a woman 35 years ago and we have produced 4 children. I have a p***s and testicles. I am clearly a biological male. Yet I do not know whether I feel like I am a man because I have no idea what such a definition means. I simply feel like myself.
Others judge me as a man. Hell, I don’t even have to announce my pronouns but I still don’t know what I feel like, except as myself.
“Conditioned gender roles”? My take on it is that girls gravitate towards caring roles, whilst boys like playing with diggers. It’s just what happens. Why is everyone obsessed by it? Why can’t we just accept that, for whatever reason, a career as a nanny is just not that appealing to most teenage boys, anymore than being a bin man is appealing to a teenage girl?
There are of course always exceptions to the normal distribution, and that’s fine, but why expect a 50/50 split? Look at millennia of history. (Technology is a red herring).
We know there are differences, but since sex role conditioning starts at birth, we won’t find out until we left humans develop to their full potential with out sex role conditioning. If the differences are innate, then why is it necessary to condition people to their respective roles?
‘what do you think is driving the trans phenomena?’
An apparently inexhaustible appetite for discovering, validating and valorising ‘vulnerable’, ‘weak’, ‘special’, ‘disabled’ and ‘different’ people in our midst.
An acquaintance of ours transitioned recently, late in life, greatly to the distress of his long-term wife and his adult children. He is covered in tattoos. He hotly pursued, with indifferent success, various work roles in the public eye. I saw him recently cycling along on his ladies’ bike in a floral dress and grotesque make-up, his eyes alive with delight as he received what he had so openly craved all his life: attention. Of course gender dysphoria is a real phenomenon, but I can’t help thinking the great trans battle is mostly a form of attention-seeking.
You’re obviously right about what drives much activism. There is an almost mawkish obsession with weakness and abnormality.
But what I meant by “the trans phenomena” was more the expansion in the number of kids experiencing gender confusion, the numbers claiming to be non-binary etc. The timescale isn’t right to claim that this is a product of trans activism – its influence on parents and teachers, such as it is, is relatively recent.
But feminism has been attacking gender norms and behaviours for a far longer time and has been very active in education, in parenting and in the media children are exposed to. Trans as an ideology is late to the party, though its influence is now doubtless being felt.
If you distinguish between feminism and feminisation I think you’ll hit the jackpot.
If you look at Spartan women, they expected their sons to be warriors and be prepared to die on the battle field as it honoured them as Mothers. The greatest disgrace for a Spartan Mother was a son to live as a coward as it dishonoured her.
I m beginning to wonder whether a lack of hard out door physical work, various chemicals in the air and water plus electromagnetic radiation may be having an impact. On their own these factors are not a problem but EM radiation and chemicals from birth with a lack of physical work are creating chemical imbalances.
The most common substances which create addiction and therefore chemical imbalances are cofffee and alcohol.
Given what Spartan women were like, you probably didn’t want to come back alive.
‘what do you think is driving the trans phenomena?’ Money. Have a look at a Jennifer Bilek youtube or two.
Agree it’s perpetuating it. If there is money to be made from it, it won’t die easily. It’s a bandwagon the money grabbers have jumped on. But it would be paranoid to think they started messing up kids sense of gender decades ago in order to reap the rewards later.
‘But I’d be interested in other views on what is driving this…’
Re: the ‘gender disphoric’ kids themselves, it’s mostly just kids being kids. Seeking attention, gaming the adult world, chasing exceptionalism, farting in church, improvising their ways through the banal/epic hurts and confusions and minor, lifelong scarrings of childhood and adolescence as best they can. Just…kids. What makes this scandal so cruel – so unforgivably cruel – is how the ‘safety buffers’ of adult supervision have failed them in ways more catastrophic than just the usual individual parental and societal in loco parentis failures. We are responding to our kids’ half-hearted, tyre-kicking and utterly normal confusions about their formative identities…by physically harming them, at clinical scale. Putting harmful chemicals into their vulnerable, perfectly healthy and functioning bodies, and cutting pieces off them.
That’s f**king barbaric insanity from the grown-ups.
Where is that coming from? Regressive barbaric insanity masquerading as contemporary progressive compassion from the adult world? I think it’s probably a reactionary existential anxiety, us grown-ups flailing about ever more desperately for some form of life meaning and moral certainty in a rapidly destabilising and fragmenting information age. It’s (apparently) hard to believe in anything now. I think what many – particularly among the intellectually and educationally elite – are defining themselves by instead is…what they don’t believe in. That is, what they (think they) oppose. Must disrupt, dismantle, deconstruct. I may not have the summons-able inner confidence to believe this or that about the imperfect world, because my fragile sense of self can’t quite cope with a concept like an ‘imperfect ideal’; but I can with confidence declare that that and this is wrong, flawed, bad. Universal standing unbelief (except in empty platitudes and unanchored truisms) as My Fervent & Passionate Belief System – because no-one can ever prove me wrong not to believe in something. Being imperfect, the world will always furnish me with observable evidence that Everything Is Sh*t, At Least Sometimes, Sooner or Later.
Dismantling – trying to – even the daily lived material facts of our human biology is the natural endpoint for those of this deeply defensive, anxious disposition: who can only state with certainty what they don’t believe. It’s no coincidence that the rise in aggressive trans activism both came out of, and has created a cuckoos’ nest within, the highly effective and successful LGB/Stonewall movement, and at a time when most of the genuine ‘sexuality rights’ battles had been essentially won. If you’re someone whose individual identity has been grounded in protesting your collective-cohort exclusion, and yet becoming cohort-included hasn’t made you more individually secure in your identity…then obviously you need to contrive a new sense of collective-cohort exclusion. Or – awkwardly – contemplate the possibility that your identity insecurity isn’t the world’s fault, but just yours. Post-Stonewall, if the world still thought you were a jerk, maybe it wasn’t because you were gay. Maybe you’re just a jerk. I guess the jerks of the LGB movement had to find a new cohort-exclusional cause/letter under which to conceal their Jerkdom. (One is short-handing, obviously. This identity narcissism sh*t gets very boring very fast. I have plenty of gay and lesbian friends. I have yet to meet a ‘trans activist’ who I can stomach for more than about half a minute. Maybe I should get out and meet some more. Maybe trans activists really are mostly just jerks. I don’t know or care enough to expand my research. Life is too short to investigate the Potential Jerkhoodness of The Other.)
We’re all stranded in the same magnificent Human predicament. None of us really has a bloody clue who we are, where we came from, or what we’re supposed to be doing here, especially to make a ‘good’ showing of living this thing called ‘life’. Most of us manage to bodge up mostly positive and constructive frameworks, purposes, behavioural codes, values, four-score-and-seven-year ‘ambitions’, and so on, that enable us to rub along with each other and the material world around us without doing more than the usual amount of damage to each other or it. That’s kind of what, of all, ‘growing up into an adult’ demands. And, also, just…is: the conscious, necessary transcendence of adolescent narcissism. Learning to live with identity and meaning fluidity; uncertainty; change. More and more of us, it seems, can’t. Can’t live with that frustratingly imperfect ambiguity. Super-ironic – although probably apt – that their anxiety and uncertainty about ‘human identity’ in that more general sense manifests as a superficial, grimly cheerful attempt to contrive biological uncertainty, as a virtue.
We always try to domesticate the monsters that scare us most, I guess. I think at its core gender affirmation therapy is a projected, inverted manifestation of our parental anxiety about…failing as parents. We’re terrified of our kids not growing up normally – that is, happy (or no more unhappy than usual for Humans!) – as a result of our bad parenting. So some – ably helped by our always-clever-clever-always-busy-busy scientific/political/media transactionalists – have been making a great proactive virtue of…preventing their kids from growing up normally. Quite literally, with coercive psychiatry, drugs and surgery.
Trying to gaslight the rest of us into similarly mistaking what is plain barbaric insanity for…therapeutic progressive compassion.
As a woman who believes in equality, I agree with you, and don’t quite understand why you received so many downticks. The problem with gender being a social construct is that it’s a slippery slope. Of course, the social roles of men and women are culturally defined to a large extent, but they are also subject to biology. Women can give birth to children whilst men cannot. That’s a biological fact, and I don’t care if the trans advocates rip themselves into two pieces like Rumpelstiltskin. The boundaries between social roles and innate differences have dissolved, and it happened so quietly that many of us didn’t notice at first. Now, we’re dealing with the fallout.
Thank you Katja. I think the problem comes when you do not limit yourself to changing the opportunities people have, their environment if you like, and start trying to change the people themselves. It’s hubris – and it leads to repression and cruelty. The soviets tried it – it didn’t work and had perverse consequences. Feminists have tried it with similar results.
We all want our daughters to have the same opportunities open to them as our sons. We just don’t want crazed zealots messing with our children’s heads.
‘But I’d be interested in other views on what is driving this…’
Re: the ‘gender disphoric’ kids themselves, it’s mostly just kids being kids. Seeking attention, gaming the adult world, chasing exceptionalism, farting in church, improvising their ways through the banal/epic hurts and confusions and minor, lifelong scarrings of childhood and adolescence as best they can. Just…kids. What makes this scandal so cruel – so unforgivably cruel – is how the ‘safety buffers’ of adult supervision have failed them in ways more catastrophic than just the usual individual parental and societal in loco parentis failures. We are responding to our kids’ half-hearted, tyre-kicking and utterly normal confusions about their formative identities…by physically harming them, at clinical scale. Putting harmful chemicals into their vulnerable, perfectly healthy and functioning bodies, and cutting pieces off them.
That’s barbaric insanity from the grown-ups.
Where is that coming from? Regressive barbaric insanity masquerading as contemporary progressive compassion from the adult world? I think it’s probably a reactionary existential anxiety, us grown-ups flailing about ever more desperately for some form of life meaning and moral certainty in a rapidly destabilising and fragmenting information age. It’s (apparently) hard to believe in anything now. I think what many – particularly among the intellectually and educationally elite – are defining themselves by instead is…what they don’t believe in. That is, what they (think they) oppose. Must disrupt, dismantle, deconstruct. I may not have the summons-able inner confidence to believe this or that about the imperfect world, because my fragile sense of self can’t quite cope with a concept like an ‘imperfect ideal’; but I can with confidence declare that that and this is wrong, flawed, bad. Universal standing unbelief (except in empty platitudes and unanchored truisms) as My Fervent & Passionate Belief System – because no-one can ever prove me wrong not to believe in something. Being imperfect, the world will always furnish me with observable evidence that Everything Is Sh*t, At Least Sometimes, Sooner or Later.
Dismantling – trying to – even the daily lived material facts of our human biology is the natural endpoint for those of this deeply defensive, anxious disposition: who can only state with certainty what they don’t believe. It’s no coincidence that the rise in aggressive trans activism both came out of, and has created a cuckoos’ nest within, the highly effective and successful LGB/Stonewall movement, and at a time when most of the genuine ‘sexuality rights’ battles had been essentially won. If you’re someone whose individual identity has been grounded in protesting your collective-cohort exclusion, and yet becoming cohort-included hasn’t made you more individually secure in your identity…then obviously you need to contrive a new sense of collective-cohort exclusion. Or – awkwardly – contemplate the possibility that your identity insecurity isn’t the world’s fault, but just yours. Post-Stonewall, if the world still thought you were a jerk, maybe it wasn’t because you were gay. Maybe you’re just a jerk. I guess the jerks of the LGB movement had to find a new cohort-exclusional cause/letter under which to conceal their Jerkdom. (One is short-handing, obviously. This identity narcissism sh*t gets very boring very fast. I have plenty of gay and lesbian friends. I have yet to meet a ‘trans activist’ who I can stomach for more than about half a minute. Maybe I should get out and meet some more. Maybe trans activists really are mostly just jerks. I don’t know or care enough to expand my research. Life is too short to investigate the Potential Jerkhoodness of The Other.)
We’re all stranded in the same magnificent Human predicament. None of us really has a bloody clue who we are, where we came from, or what we’re supposed to be doing here, especially to make a ‘good’ showing of living this thing called ‘life’. Most of us manage to bodge up mostly positive and constructive frameworks, purposes, behavioural codes, values, four-score-and-seven-year ‘ambitions’, and so on, that enable us to rub along with each other and the material world around us without doing more than the usual amount of damage to each other or it. That’s kind of what, of all, ‘growing up into an adult’ demands. And, also, just…is: the conscious, necessary transcendence of adolescent narcissism. Learning to live with identity and meaning fluidity; uncertainty; change. More and more of us, it seems, can’t. Can’t live with that frustratingly imperfect ambiguity. Super-ironic – although probably apt – that their anxiety and uncertainty about ‘human identity’ in that more general sense manifests as a superficial, grimly cheerful attempt to contrive biological uncertainty, as a virtue.
We always try to domesticate the monsters that scare us most, I guess. I think at its core gender affirmation therapy is a projected, inverted manifestation of our parental anxiety about…failing as parents. We’re terrified of our kids not growing up normally – that is, happy (or no more unhappy than usual for Humans!) – as a result of our bad parenting. So some – ably helped by our always-clever-clever-always-busy-busy scientific/political/media transactionalists – have been making a great proactive virtue of…preventing their kids from growing up normally. Quite literally, with coercive psychiatry, drugs and surgery.
Trying to gaslight the rest of us into similarly mistaking what is plain barbaric insanity for…therapeutic progressive compassion. With every day that passes now, I’m fairly confident that what we have allowed to happen, in plain sight, will come to be regarded as more and more unfathomably cruel. For that, we owe public intellectuals like Bindel and others our eternal thanks and respect.
Morning. One of many drivers is Jennifer Pritzker. People with money have extraordinary influence.
Gender may, or may not, be partially a social construct, but sex is not. This is where the trans ideologues lost their minds completely, and seemed to resurrect the gender stereotypes from their deathbeds by forcing gay or non-conforming males and females to start thinking they were born in the wrong bodies.
Some of the most vehement opponents of gender ideology, you may not have noticed, have been grown up tomboys fearing what would have happened to then if they had been children today
Almost certainly it is partially a social construct. The issue is with the feminist claim that it is wholly so. And more important with their attempts via education and parenting to force changes which run against the innate elements.
The most we can say about the trans phenomena is that we do not really understand it and that more research needs to be done.
My guess is that the vehemence of some anti trans people comes more from a fear that they may in fact be trans themselves (in a broad sense). These people have developed their own ways of resolving the dissonance they feel around their identities. The trans phenomena opens old psychological wounds.
I have never read any feminist theory that claims there are no differences between the sexes. But people love to blame feminism for every ill. Gender stereotypes are social constructs. There are biological differences between the sexes and they matter, but are ignored in areas like medical research. The women who identify as feminists today who have embraced Queer Theory are the antithesis of second wave feminists. Unfortunately, the backlash against us continues.
You haven’t read much feminist theory then! Or do you mean just physical differences?
In regards to what’s driving this regressive, authoritarian, elitist, and anti-democratic ideology, the med tech and phamaceutical billions are funding it. Billionaire Martine Rothblatt claims that trans ideology is a necessary stepping stone to transhumanism. Check him out. And predatory men have a big investment in acting out their hatred of women by invading, rape crisis shelters, prisons, locker rooms, and rest rooms. And there are the people who haven’t delved into it, and think that supporting trans ideology is progressive and an opportunity for virtue signalling.
Kudos to you Julie Bindel.
I sincerely hope this is a watershed moment in medical treatment for gender distressed children, women’s rights to protect their spaces, and freedom of speech.
But I also know that, to paraphrase the famous saying, the price of victory is eternal vigilance. People who would mutilate children under the guise of “kindness” aren’t going to be stopped so easily.
I have been waiting to hear whether our own Talia Perkins is going to fall into line and admit that Cass has provided a balanced response and that Talia’s previous shrill assertions that gender ideology was underpinned by irrefutable evidence was wrong or issue an angry denunciation of the report.
Let us see if Julie Bindel will be uncancelled by those organisations that have treated her shamefully or whether she will remain a pariah to her erstwhile leftist colleagues as someone who was premature in her denunciation of the cult beliefs.
Talia will go to ground Jeremy. She wouldn’t listen to reason from any quarter; despite overwhelming evidence about the harm caused by all the medical interventions. She was brainwashed by an ideology so it was pointless to try to have an adult conversation with her. She will ‘forget’ about her role in this scandal and move on to her next ’cause’.
Are you sure that it’s a she? I am convinced that it’s a he who “feels” that he is a she. None of them has ever been able to describe and define that feeling. Being a woman is a lived experience that grows out of our biology. I have no idea what it feels like to be a man; I don’t even know how another woman feels, because I am not her.
A man masquerading as a woman; are you mad?!! Good point Katja. In my own naïve world, I hadn’t considered the possibility.
She won’t be uncanceled. Cults do not allow for that. Once you have deviated from the dogma, you are forever a heretic. It doesn’t matter if you turn out to be right. Besides, how does one go back to “friends” who so eagerly cast them aside in the name of harming kids?
I don’t read most of the foul-mouthed, regurgitated nonsense TP publishes, but I don’t think we will see any repentance from that side. If anything happens it will be an angry denunciation full of ad hominem attacks.
I’m guessing she will feel that the Cass report has cherry picked research, or ignored the research supporting the trans activist case.
I think Cass is right. We have been proceeding recklessly on the basis of inadequate knowledge. We need to pause until we know more.
I also think we should show more humility about our abilities. We cannot turn boys into girls and girls into boys even if we wanted to. The most we can do is create poor imitations, at a high cost to the individuals involved. That needs to be made absolutely clear.
Yes, humility. A quote from the recent Vatican document ’Dignitas Infinita’: ‘Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God . . .’
Those of us who condemned the so-called “Covid vaccines” feel exactly the same about the bandwagon jumpers coming out of the woodwork now that the whole deception and revolting lies are unravelling.
As opposed to hobbyhorse jumpers!
I was massively in favour of covid vaccines because I looked at the cost/benefit analysis.
I absolutely condemned the mutilation and sterilization of confused children who have to suffer the consequences of a cult ideology which has managed to infiltrate the NHS, schools, and numerous other institutions. You don’t always have to be in one camp!!
What I don’t understand is why are the genderbenderists paying special heed to the Cass report when before they were immune to any other kind of scientific inquiry?
Perhaps they are not. But they will go quiet for a bit.
Get ready for the ‘victims’ charm offensive’. The trans-activists won’t want to lose their prominence. The Cass Report isn’t the end of the story.
In Australia they are saying the Cass Report does not apply to us because we have always done it properly. Of course, they won’t allow scrutiny.
Thank you, Julie! You have been very brave and very right and you have suffered for it. The spell is broken! Rejoice!
Yvette Cooper always has a straight face, looking people straight into the eye and speaking with such conviction! Some may even take her seriously!
If she has a child who is trans or an activist it makes her life impossible to speak her mind. This is a major issue on business today if you have colleagues, especially senior ones, who have trans kids. They are almost obliged to buy into the whole trans agenda to reconcile that with their domestic situation
You do have to wonder what possible outcome of all this JB would be happy with. Endless letters of apology “yes JB you were right all along”?
I personally think the Cass report is a good thing. We need to understand the trans phenomena far better before we start considering what our response to it should be.
But it really has little to do with JBs main focus of concern – her paranoid fear that allowing trans women to use the ladies will lead to an epidemic of rapists in frocks.
Well, that’s what I would be demanding if I were her. And why not?
If I win an argument, or am proved right, and others admit they were wrong – I don’t expect them to grovel, and I don’t attack them for their capacity to change their mind. Do you?
I’m with you there, David. When people change their minds when the evidence changes, they should be welcomed on their return to sanity.
Exactly – otherwise you are forcing people to stick stupidly to their guns. I would have thought people changing their minds when presented with evidence was a reason for optimism. Admitting they were wrong even more so.
While gender “medicine” for kids might have started in the Netherlands, it really took off in the Unites States and from there, spread throughout the world. It was spread by unscrupulous profit-driven clinics, ready to put money first and children last. It’s a similar story to the synthetic opiods, which again, were pushed by the profit-driven American healthcare system and now look like they are about to hit European shores. It’s therefore fitting that the madness of gender “medicine” for kids has been stopped in its tracks by the NHS – not profit-driven and – for better or worse – needing to eke every last penny of value of of scarce funds.
Thank you for the ‘background’ checks.
It’s a funny business isn’t it. Feminist parents encouraging little Johnny to play with dolls, and little sally to play with trucks. And wouldn’t you like to dress like a princess too Johnny? Johnny, why are you so rough? Wouldn’t you like to play kitchens with Sally. You don’t want to be rough like those nasty boys who fight, do you Johnny? You want to be more like Sally.
Then years later: what do you mean John – you want to wear a frock and use the ladies toilet? Oh no Johnny, no Johnny, no, no, no!
Chickens. Home. Roost.
Yes – decades of deconstructing traditional gender roles and trying to change innate gendered behaviours – and hey presto, gender confused kids. What a surprise!
I doubt it’s the only cause – there have always been some trans men and masculine presenting lesbians etc. But can it really be complete coincidence that it has become such a thing at this historical moment, right after decades of feminism in parenting and schools?
I think that suggesting feminism as the cause of this is a complete misreading of history. The roots of trans activism do not lie with a few boys playing with dolls or (rather more) girls playing with Mechano and trucks. They lie in many places: academia in going rather too far with the notion of the validity of subjective experience and replacing objective reality with ‘lived experience’; the medical market, particularly in the USA, that saw a really good new opportunity to make money; a UK charity that had fought successfully for the rights of lesbians and gays and needed a new role once equal marriage became law; the desire of a bunch of unsavoury men to find new ways to intimidate women; the demise of the valuing of truth; and the role of social media in intimidating the many and celebrating the few. Threaded through all of it is the desire of some to be seen as important, as significant and so the codswallop got promoted and the challengers got intimidated and punished. Trans activism is a cult and its adherents exhibit typical behaviours of cult members. It has happened before: the persecution of “witches”, McCarthy era in the USA. It will happen again.
Nothing I disagree with here – though the trend you identify in academia was also closely tied to feminism.
Though you’ll note that in my comment I am talking more about the trans phenomena (gender confused kids) than the activism which is allied with it.
a UK charity that had fought successfully for the rights of lesbians and gays and needed a new role once equal marriage became law;
let’s put a spotlight on that statement and the ugly truth that it reveals about activists for any cause: their inability to declare victory and call it a day. These people have no real interest in resolving issues; their existence depends on the exact opposite.
Which for some, of course, makes the whole trans thing a bit of a godsend. Not just the supporters though, the opposers too.
I agree with you Pat. We tried to bring up our children to be unconstrained by gender stereotypes. Only to see the next generation focus more on stereotypes and any variation from these norms was seen as trans. I blame marketing which creates more sales by gendering everything to do with children, no unisex activities or clothing tolerated. Have you seen the way people dress newborn infants?
The same with race Inga. It’s appalling!
What you seem to be saying is that you tried to foist your beliefs on your children, aided and abetted by their teachers no doubt, but it didn’t take. So you’re blaming marketing.
I’m looking forward to the day when those feminist parents urge little Johnny to rediscover his ‘toxic masculinity’ as the Chinese and/or Russian hordes sweep towards our borders. They’ll also need to reassure him that extreme racism is fine – he’ll need to hate those Russians/Chinese enough to kill lots of them. This will be in the interests of his mother and sisters as I doubt either of those armies will be kind to ‘women and girls’, when they arrive. Actually, they’re unlikely to be kind to old men too, so perhaps I should be careful what I wish for.
Another very perceptive and elucidating comment; thank you.
You and those like you on this issue are heroes, Julie. Thank God for people with your courage and clarity.
.As for the rest …. and with apologies for going Godwin, I commend Browning’s seminal study ‘Ordinary Men’ (the clue is in the name) about a bunch of middle aged unremarkable reserve policemen from Hamburg who were taken off helping old ladies across roads and getting cats down from trees and were sent off to Poland to shoot Jews in 1941 – and who shot every Jew put in front of them, even when they were told they did not have to, for no reason other than they wanted to ‘fit in’ with their group and ‘go with the flow’.
That’s exactly what we have with these people here.
Politicians like Streeting, clinicians, journalists, BBC news managers, universities, publishers, student bodies, charities, and and every rotten ‘self-identified’ (sic) ‘progressive’ (sic) who fell in with the prevailing mad orthodoxy of their group because they wanted to ‘fit in’ and ‘go with the flow’, and so gave free rein to the mutilation and vivisection of vulnerable children, and the hounding, career destruction, rape and death threats directed at women like you who stood up.
Failures not only in their professional or work capacities. Failures as human beings.
And the key point here is this. These non-apologies. This ‘two-siding’. This ‘toxicity’. This continued name calling and denigration of those like you and Duffield and Rowling and Forstater and Joyce and Linehan and Moore and Joan Smith and those others who put it on the line to speak out ….IT IS STILL JUST MORE OF THE SAME!!!!!
This, too, is the absolute moral abnegation of “go with the flow”. It’s just Cass and your work has changed the environment, and shifted the line of least resistance a few paces from where it was, so now they shift too, groping again for the easiest line to take.
Looking in the mirror? Genuine contrition? Genuine self-awareness? None.
I can’t forgive them. These people are moral lepers. They make me sick.
My god we’re really digging out the “just like the Nazis” stuff today aren’t we. Projection or what. Calm down, let the vehemence and seething fantasies of violence subside, wait until your reason begins to engage. Then comment. Otherwise you just sound silly. Really – this is nothing like the third Reich. And people you disagree with are not automatically just like Nazis.
You’re welcome.
I think people are mad because, not only was a lot of the transgender woo a blatant lie, but that a number of people who pointed this out actually lost their jobs or received death threats. While not quite at the level of the third reich, there are similarities in how both came about.
They’ve been drugging and mutilating children, David. Does the name Josef Mengele not ring any bells?
Thank you Richard.
My reason IS engaged. It is considering the thousands of children who were mutilated. It is considering the years of lying, of bullying, of cancelling, of treating commonsense as a crime. It is considering the many dignified, unhappy detransitioners I have heard tell of their terrible, ruinous experience. Comparisons with Nazism are not only adequate, they are required. And you are one of those culpably insensitive and self-satisfied people Ms.Bindel is quite rightly denouncing. I suggest you examine your conscience.
Baroness Susan Greenfield says the human brain is not fully formed until the age of 20 years so there is good justification of not allowing any changes until a person is 21 years and then they have to pay for procedures.
Susan Greenfield, Baroness Greenfield – Wikipedia
People should not lose jobs or be financially adversely impacted for criticising Transgender ideas. The defeat of Nazism and Communism was to protect freedom of speech.
That’s a nice summation. Moral and intellectual pygmies marinating in their own self-rightenousness.
Superbly put.
The reality is that for most people by one’s late 30s one is a wage slave. Middle managers do what they are told . Once one has a mortgage and family to support, people will turn a blind eye to most things. I cannot believe that the vast numbers of teachers, social workers, doctors, councillors, MPs and Police officers did not not know or suspect the activities of the Muslim Pakistani grooming gangs but did nothing, to keep their jobs. Where could a middle ranking person in their late 30s go to find a job with the same security, pay and pension if they reported the Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs ? When Ann Cryer MP, spoke out she was villified by the Labour Party. The reality is that employment within most inner cities/towns is dominated by the power of the Labour Party and few have the money to afford to cross it. Much advertising in local newspapers is paid for by local councils and they control planning permissions.
The days when Chief Constables( with pensions ) were former military officers( colonel and above ) and they recruited ex sergeants( with pensions ) meant Police had financial independence which meant they were less susceptible to corruption and political pressure.
When will Julie, Hannah Barnes, Michael Biggs, Graham Linehan and Helen Joyce (to name just a few) get an apology and their lives back? Can we now look forward to the Father Ted Musical?We need an inquiry so that those complicit in this scandal are prosecuted. There are organisations that should be defunded immediately, individuals who should be struck off and other bodies, like the BBC, who need scrutiny. For example, if the BBC is to be truly impartial, do they really need a LGBT and Identity team? And maybe they should hire real journalists so they can hold other institutions to proper account?
When will the Labour Party offer an apology for filibusting Liz Triss’ Private Member’s Bill or for hounding one of their own MPs, Rosie Duffield?
I always hoped that ‘madness’ would blow over and it has, finally, good for you for sticking to your values. I’m no fan of Streeting, he really can’t take criticism and doesn’t answer questions, and when pushed he gets downright defensive. Of course he never did have any skin in the game, he’s a career politician.
All these people may have changed their opinions – but have they actually changed their minds?
That’s a really reasonable question.
I actually think most pro trans opinions were pretty lightly held. Just no one wanted to be tripped up by the “what is a woman” question, or otherwise made to look like a bigot.
So I don’t think they have changed their minds – I just don’t think most of them (politicians, not clinicians) were that invested anyway.
Would you believe it, they agreed with us all along? If you do, then you shouldn’t. Still, Labour’s promise to implement the Cass Report, though wildly unlikely to be put into practice just as nor are the Conservatives going to do any such thing, will nevertheless put some people off voting Labour. They may go the Liberal Democrats, who would make a play for them if they thought that it might work. But most of them will probably go to the Greens. Jolly good.
People who most certainly had not done so would also pretend to have agreed with us all along if Joe Biden really did drop the charges against Julian Assange. They are already doing so over a ceasefire in Gaza, but no one is buying that. Keir Starmer is the man alive who has done most to keep Assange behind bars, and now nothing could win back to his party the votes that it had lost over Gaza. Again, jolly good.
Thanks Julie. I agree!
Once again, the ugly deniers were right. What’s the next horror? It’s looking like the Jew scapegoating. We gonna go down that road, too? What a world we’ve created. Ugly.
What astonishes me is that the Cass Report was even necessary. Giving children chemicals to inhibit their natural growth and performing surgical mutilation? This was done by medical professionals who surely knew better? Good G*d, the damage is unimaginable, and so, too, will be the lawsuits. I hope the perpetrators all go to prison.
But it happened against a background belief that nature can be changed and improved on. Taboos against cosmetic surgery etc are long gone. And arguably on the route that leads to transhumanism and cyborgs. Brain implants are being worked on as we speak.
If you are like me, you are repulsed – but for some this is the final liberation from the constraints of biology – even of reality itself.
Are you pissed?!!!
Yes, this is indeed transhumanism. Jennifer Bilek explains the agenda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLXdoqXbC6k#ddg-play
No one goes to prison in this country for committing heinous acts. ‘So-called’ medical professionals have committed appalling crimes by mutilating and sterilizing confused and vulnerable children.
It needs to be said that trans activism is mobilized by pharma and those surgeons and other physicians who stand to gain by producing life-long patients in this sad cases of confused kids same as the opioids produced life long addicted patients. First do no harm is no longer a credo if it ever was.
Early in her report Hilary Cass states: ‘….you must have the same standards of care as everyone else in the NHS.’, in relation to ‘treatment’ for gender dysphoria (or whatever it’s being called this week).
Hear, hear! If an acutely ill patient suffering a heart attack or a stroke is having to wait 72 hours in an A&E department or the back of an ambulance then this suggests a fickle teenager that’s taken a notion to be a boy rather than a girl should have to wait about…… ten years. By then the problem will probably have sorted itself out anyway.
The upside of long waiting lists!
Well, quite so. Time fixes most problems when medicine achieves little. Go to them when desperate or when it’s simple like a broken bone.
Well said Julie. You have been a stalwart regarding this issue and I salute your guts and determination in standing up to the cowards who would silence you if they could.
Being Leftist means never having to say you’re sorry. Or even admitting you have anything to be sorry about.
Sadly, it is not a trait exclusive to those on the Left.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of loud voice coming from the Left so I understand your comment.
Brilliant article. Many, many thanks!
But then yesterday, disingenuity was the order of the day.
Well, yes; and nothing else will happen. Nothing. Just like nothing will happen to those whose actions during Covid caused widespread harm. Just like will happen with a host of decisions that had foreseeable bad consequences but were undertaken anyway, perhaps because those consequences were seen as features, not bugs.
I have to laugh a little bit about the part about men intruding into female-only spaces. Where was this concern when the early feminists demanded their “right” to enter male-only spaces? The tactics used then mirror the ones used now; all that changed is the target, essentially an instance of principals over principles.
The last paragraph mirrors the Covid after math down to a T, pun intended, with the only difference being jab skeptics were not accused of transphobia. The rest, however, holds true – lost jobs, lost friends, etc. The past has this odd way of repeating itself in different forms. In a few days, the feined regret will fade away, to be replaced by some new outrage.
I think there’s a difference. While I’ve no interest in joining a male only club (especially if it would have me as a member) men should certainly be allowed them. Female only spaces can represent something quite different. Certainly, they want places away from men just as men might butbthey are also entitled to places which are safe from the worst of us.
A few years ago, there was a woman in a pub toilet talking with her boyfriend. I was irritated but hardly threatened by her. There’s a difference.
Julie, you have an obligation to be “I told you so”. I am an American so I don’t know who that politician is whose picture is displayed. But he looks like a robot–like all those quack politicians you are talking about. Julie, we need you and your writing, not robot politicians.
Thank you for this and absolutely – be bitter. No apology needed. Wes Streeting is the most shameless of all of them for me. Utterly spineless when it mattered. Tells us all we need to know. Cass is a watershed but I still worry that not enough will change and much within the report – social transitioning being far from benign, for instance. The causes behind the frightening rise in girls hating being girls because of online influences etc – won’t be looked at further. Will the horror of this medical experiment ON CHILDREN reach into the public consciousness like Mr Bates / Horizon has? I worry that it will not. Quick question. These are distressed children with gender confusion a manifestation of something deeper. That’s so obvious. So, why have ‘gender’ clinics and not simply clinics to support their mental and emotional distress? Will these new clinics be like that? Is ‘affirmation’ a prerequisite for referral? I am scratching my head about this, given the profile of who was presenting at GIDS changed so dramatically. Of course, Scotland still has its ‘Tavistock’. How can that last? Will Scotland be an outlier?
I don’t blame you for feeling some bitterness Julie – career politicians will always back the most expedient horse. But I hope you feel some solace from the fact that everything you’ve been saying about this issue for the past 20 years is finally gaining traction.
PS Pink news has just reverted to type https://www.thepinknews.com/2024/04/11/cass-report-anti-trans-bigots/
No one is trans or nonbuy-nary. These are decadent inventions, says this clinical psychologist (and gay)
The Cass report is already being interpreted differently depending on your political standpoint:
Times: “We told you so: transgender ideology has led to state sponsored child abuse”.
Guardian: “Cass report calls for heartless Tories to provide huge injection of funding for mental health services”.
“the Joni Mitchell diversion tactic”, attributing the toxicity of the “debate” to “both sides”
Um, no….. Judy Collins.
No it was Joni … https://americansongwriter.com/the-meaning-behind-both-sides-now-by-joni-mitchell/
One of the biggest concerns we ALL should have is the damage done to the professions that are backstops for young people and young adults who are suffering from mental illness. They have been handed a heavy dose of professional self-doubt and lousy tools. I don’t know this Yvette Cooper but apparently she has a troubled son. The ages between 15 and 25 are tough to navigate for even the most grounded of individuals. And here is an entire generation and their parents now plunged into the depths of self-doubt during a time when the most basic of realities, the sex of your person, has been turned on its head.
There is no alternative to all out war with the trans lobby. been are men and women are women; Full stop. I can imagine that I am a bumble bee, or that I can fly and jump off the top of the Empire State Building. But I will end as tomato joule on the pavement below. As a bumble bee, I will probably end as lunch for a bird.
There’s nothing cowardly, in my opinion, in changing one’s mind when presented with irrefutable evidence that one is wrong.
Would it be better to be ‘courageous’ and refuse to U-turn out of a sense of perhaps embarrassment at being duped by those purporting to stand for kindness and progressive ideals? No, let’s be thankful they have finally returned to sanity.
Remember how badly ‘progressives’ took the scholarly report by Tom Sewell on systemic racism, a few years ago? Screams of ‘bigots’ charter were heard throughout the left. The same could have happened here.
I’m sad that people like Bindel and JK Rowling have faced so much criticism, simply for daring to raise concerns and stating the obvious truth.
No platforming has been used by left wing groups since the late 1960s. The Transgender groups are just a the last in a collection of groups who wish to silence those who criticise them.
Orwell noticed that PEN was indifferent to censorship in 1946- The Prevention of Literature .
Yes – seems to be a thing called trans amnesia – forgetting that the tactics used by trans activists have been part of the activist playbook for decades.
When it comes to men and woman it may be helpful to think of two normal distribution curves which overlap but are not identical. Some women enjoy boxing and rugby but it is much less than men. Sharon Davies has examined physical qualites. Men have approximately a 10% advantage in long distance running events, 30 % in sprinting but 160 % in punching power and also strength of skull and neck. Men can punch harder but also cope with harder blows to the head than women. Women have much better balance than men, hence their ability to perform backward somersaults on the beam.
Woman can play any sports they want but compete against biological woman, not men.
Hopefully there will be a similar report done on the decolonisation of maths and the DEI overkill…..and other woke ideologies!!