You come at the queen, you better not miss. Credit: Mike Marsland/WireImage
There is an interesting site which breaks down American voting trends by occupation. Some of it is mysterious — why should pediatricians swing so overwhelmingly to the Democrats? Why should urology be so dominated by Republicans? Readers may insert their own jokes here.
But some of the voting patterns are far from surprising. No one would expect yoga teaching to be a hotbed of radical right-wing activity, for instance, and yogis do indeed push heavily to the left.
Perhaps even less shocking, though, is the realisation that there is one area in which the political left appears to have an absolute clean sweep of the profession. In the book publishing industry 100% of respondents in the survey identify as being on the left, the sort of echo chamber that even academia can only look at with envy.
To those with friends in publishing, despairing at the regular struggle session-style get-together they are now subjected to in which every conceivable centre-left political orthodoxy is celebrated, this is not a revelation. Although the survey in question is from the US, it is certain that a similar pattern can be found over here, too.
It is only by understanding this that one can make any sense of an otherwise baffling and strikingly badly-written letter which appeared this week in The Bookseller (the trade publication of the book publishing business). The open letter, inaccurately titled “The paradox of tolerance”, is a strange document for many reasons. Not the least is that it is signed anonymously, by figures in the book trade at once both sure of their convictions and also terrified of having their convictions attributed to them. What is the cause of this pseudo-samizdat? What opinion can be so errant that it requires this level of anonymity?
The answer is that the open letter is based around the claim that “transphobia is still perfectly acceptable in the British book industry”. From the outset this anonymous letter is framed in Lutherian terms. “Somebody, sooner or later, must speak up,” the authors bravely begin. This is proper “Here I stand” territory. Yet whereas Martin Luther was simply facing down the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Emperor at the Diet of Worms, the anonymous authors of this letter are taking on the might of children´s fiction departments across west London. No wonder they wish to keep their identities secret. The retributions could be unimaginable.
Although The Bookseller claims that it has tried to independently verify that the signatories of the letter are in fact people in the book trade, one does begin to have doubts. For instance, in relation to trans issues the authors believe that “Our industry is still very comfortable about giving this form of prejudice a powerful platform.”
Doubtless referring to the decision of Hachette to publish the fearsome and controversial work known as The Ickabog, by J.K. Rowling, the letter makes the claim that it is perfectly acceptable in the publishing industry to argue that trans people should have “less than full human rights”. Anti-trans sentiment is now so rife that they are forced to make a stand.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeIt is always a delight to read anything by Douglas Murray.
What is so funny is it is they who are like the Germans of the 30s, forbidding speach, shutting up the majority, using fear to do so.
Not just the Germans in the 30s, but every fascist or tyrannical Government and society throughout human history. Do we never learn? Stalinists, Maoists, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, on it goes.
The European countries ( including Russia) finally came out of it , but the one ( big place pop 1.4 billion) which hasn’t is a favourite with the current cancel lot on how wonderful it is to have no opposition. They don’t seem to realize that they are being used (by money which is given both to them & politicians who enact their ideas) to break up western countries and who will then be discarded as well as those they cancelled, as none of their ideas are practiced in about 9/10ths of the world. Its only the western world that tolerates their nonsense.
I still don’t understand what rights “trans” people are without other than apparently the right to infringe on the welfare of biological females
It is a very, very sinister thing this…. to erase womanhood…. it is always men who are after that…. you never hear anything like that of a trans man… eg. Woman turned man…. sex in some form seem to be a big part of it too….
…apparently including the belief that being a fully equipped bloke in a frock allows you to demand sexual favours from a Lesbian Woman…on pain of their being denounced as transphobes. (If I’ve offended any Lesbian Women out there, let me know…I’m an old straight white bloke, so I’m not necessarily up-to-date on quite how I should make the point terminology-wise) RSF
See the “Loretta” scene from monty pythons life of Brian for a full explanation.
my understanding is that the incel internet subculture, (overweight, do nothing , still living with their parent at 40, resentful of women types) that subculture essentially became the male to female trans movement. like Ludo says its a weak attempt to get sex, they say they are a women and they attempt to shame / trick lesbians in to having sex. I wouldn’t recommend it but if you start looking through twitter for these groups and followers its not long before you hit posts on incest and worse sexual fetishes on their twitter feeds. i forgot his name but the Scottish Greens LGBT youth wing leader, now calls himself Eildeh is particularly horrific.
Can this be true?
Yes.
It is true. They are the “rainbow greens” and he is an open “nappy fetishist” whose internet posts will make you both sick and angry (if you are a normal human being).
I’m sure it’s true that it’s on twitter. But that doesn’t mean an awful lot.
I think you are correct ( or at least I hope so!!)
“the Scottish Greens LGBT youth wing”
I’m laughing now, but they’ll probably be running the country next week and lowering the voting age to 11.
But only if you have transitioned …
I’m a Dutch male and I can clearly remember a time in Holland that we had….believe it or not…. The Paedophile Party, yes, a political party which had in their manifesto the the age for consensual sex should be lowered to 10 years old…..
George remember the PIE (The Paedophile Information Exchange)? Which Harriet Harman has memory loss about? It is always the same story. It is always ‘MEN’ involved to get their sexual needs…. there might be the occasional woman but that is more the exception than the rule…. Read Douglass Murray’s ‘Madness of the crowds’… they are sick…..
Not forgetting the right to conduct medical experiments on minors, except that they effectively have that …
They don’t understand, either, but that’s beside the point. Grievance is an industry. There is a living to be made, notoriety to be gained, and political power to be seized by wearing the mantle of victimhood. The race hustlers showed everyone else the way. And it won’t stop. It never stops. Because no one riding the gravy train wants it to run out of track.
The snake oil salesmen of the world have found primal fears of large swaths of people far deeper than their receding hairline, their complexion, their very souls. They realized people fear coming across as mean.
When people have such an obvious skinner box to hit over and over, they will keep pressing it so long as it gets them what they want.
There are no goals – as with most modern activism. There is no attempt to have a “votes for women” goal, or “sit where I want on the bus” goal, the achievement of which would represent a victory.
That’s the whole point of modern SJW activism – to have no goal which might impede the ability to carry on moaning forever (in many cases, lucrative moaning).
Trans-people are .0003% of the population according to the US Census Bureau. I doubt this figure is any different elsewhere.
Trans peoples rights are amply covered by the existing human rights legal regime in all Western countries. To claim otherwise is to participate in a witch hunt which seeks to purge any authority or voice that will not embrace trans enthusiasm and celebration. It is a fear of criticism and disapproval rather than a loss of actual human rights that is driving this mania.
Grow Up. Your trans forbearers would be ashamed of your juvenile behaviour and snivelling. They were made of much sterner stuff.
A simple yet telling example of the publishing industry’s zeal to signal its superior virtue is to be found in the frontispiece inserted by Penguin in the current editions of Nancy Mitford novels. “In this book are some expressions and depictions of prejudices that were commonplace in British society at the time it was written [mid-20th C]. These prejudices were wrong then and are wrong today. We are printing the novel as it was originally published because to make changes would be the same as pretending these prejudices never existed.”
How grateful we feel that they publish the original text. How sanctimonious, censorious and smug can you get?
Mitford’s books were funny and entertaining when they were written and are funny and entertaining now. What a weird world these publishers must live in that they cannot just accept this! If they have books from this era on their shelves do they burn them or inscribe woke messages on the front papers and replace them on their shelves?
Ninety-five per cent of my reading comes from secondhand bookshops – and the books are 50-100 years old. Cheaper too than the modern rubbish and better bound. Exceptions in the past five years are books by DM and certain scientific books on the genome and population movements since the beginning of human time.
So you people over there still read books? Lawd! I do, too, but I pull them off trash piles, or download them free from dubious pirate web sites. And there are still ‘publishers’, too. Quite remarkable. Have the secret police been notified?
Perhaps I am more selective than you!
The Emperor penguin has no clothes
Well said, I dislike these little warnings intensely. Can’t we be trusted to work things out for ourselves?
Bit like the Oscars, publishers will merely sign their own death warrant, by producing stuff that nobody wants to read.
Concerning children’s and young adult books, 2016 seems to be a good cut-off point. After that, there is a fair chance they have been written by tick-box. Before 2016 and the book might actually be quite good.
The saddest thing I saw was the third book in a trilogy where the writer had shoe-horned in a series of “issues” which hadn’t been hinted at in the first two and had “thanked” a pressure group for their suggestions for making his writing more “inclusive”. A sort of modern day “dedicated to Comrade Stalin, for his wise advice”.
You mean you aren’t going to buy Meghan’s new masterpiece?
I wish I could give a few more upvotes for general snarkyness.
…I’ve added some on your behalf…
Be careful, England’s most august Gynarchy, the Arts Society* has just ruined a Lecturer’s career for making a similar “snarky “ remark about the sainted Megan creature.
(* formerly NADFAS).
thanks for the guidance, i’ve been thinking along these lines regarding my children and what books i’m buying for them.
Always a joy to read Douglas Murray. What still strikes me though is the inability of so many to think through the problem. Additionally, I remember 15 – 20 years ago, when the liberal-left was passionate about free speech and orthodoxy. It is genuinely frightening that so many abandoned their principles for the first two-bit, half-baked, morally bankrupt ideology. Madness indeed.
You might want to consider the possibility that the “so many” never actually held those principles nor do they truly hold to the current tripe. It is all about power and being in the movement of the moment.
The west, and the UK specifically, is one of the most tolerant and liberal societies to have ever existed in the history of human civilisation. Equal rights are afforded to all regardless of their colour or sexuality, everyone has a right to an opinion and, in general, if you work hard you can reap the benefits.
It’s always worth remembering that when confronted with people who would like you to think that the UK is on par with the third reich or the Stalinist USSR when it comes to discussions over ‘trans rights’.
What do you mean “on par with… the Stalinist USSR”?
Do you not know that Stalin was a great man, and it is modern Britain that needs to change? I have actually encountered that argument, admittedly on Twitter. Apparently he didn’t have anyone murdered, either, unlike the Tories, who, I was informed, are wilfully slaughtering the poor on a massive scale.
Sorry comrade I misspoke. I will submit myself for re-education at the gulag immediately.
Although i have a basic grasp of Latin and history, still the Luther analogy gave me a flashback to a headline i saw earlier on Breitbart London:
(Diet of Worms)I’ll take my coat now.
“Environmental Benefits” but not if you are the next person to go to the bathroom.
Thanks for the laugh 🙂
Well, yes, but in essence we have known all this for some decades. I more or less stopped buying new books around 20 years ago as I could no longer bear to fund this industry in any way. This was partly because it was so obviously full of lefties, but also due to the endless TV chef books and the fact that whenever I bought a new book it would invariably show up in the remainder bin a few months later for a fraction of the price. These days the only books I buy new are those by Iain McGilchrist and some specialist wine and film books.
Meanwhile, it is wonderful to see that Jordan Peterson had three of the top five best selling books in Australia recently, and that people like Douglas continue to sell very well. Perhaps someone could start a publishing house to publish the likes of JP and DM. This would severely harm the profits of the existing publishers.
That’s the secret – start a new publishing industry. After all, we still have the free market – just. Too much of our energy is taken up in complaining to an audience of like minds. The real challenge to the left will come from people with the will to decamp and start again.
Yep! When an industry or institution becomes moribund, sustaining only a clique. Build an alternative, even a small one. Way to go.
Talking of cliques, the London Review of Books is a care home for the like-minded
People like Ben Shapiro and Tim Pool in the US are starting to do this by commissioning non-woke films etc.
See the films by Martin Durkin too. Pay per view. He has given up on the mainstream industry for funding his films. Just heard about his latest, The Great American Race Game and intend to watch. I suppose it is the whole publicity machine that is lacking when effectively ‘self publishing’ and it can be a perilous way to make a living if you don’t make the sales. I suspect it would take a committed publishing insider to take the plunge and start a new publishing house to publish a wide range of good books with divergent opinions. There is already enough self censoring going on, so more power to anyone who does enable authors to express their true voice. I do like a proper book.
Yes, I have seen Martin Durkin interviews on ‘So What You’re Saying is…’ a couple of times. A great man. I have thought for some time that conservatives i the West will eventually have to resort to some kind of samizdat in order to disseminate their ideas.
I have fond memories of Iain McGilchrist teaching me Eng. Lit. A-level 40 years ago. He used to take us discreetly to the pub for tutorials.
I am very envious. I was doing Eng Lit A level almost 40 years ago but there were, sadly, no pubs involved. And certainly no future public intellectuals.
Those were the days!
You don’t do mainstream media and you basically stopped buying new books around 20 years ago. How do you keep so up to date with what’s happening in our culture?
Daily Mail, free online, it is the pulse of the West.
Regnery seems to do well already.
More than 20 years, even back to the 70s 80s, all the “self-help” books and “alternate medicine” books, all quackery. The publishing industry stopped vetting for quality a long time ago.
“Yet whereas Martin Luther was simply facing down the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Emperor at the Diet of Worms, the anonymous authors of this letter are taking on the might of children´s fiction departments across west London. No wonder they wish to keep their identities secret. The retributions could be unimaginable.”
Ah, Douglas; I love you!
Yea, but people weren’t taking screen shots of everything said back then, to use later to wreck your life.
Anyway, the Edict of Worms, which fallowed Luther’s refusal to recant his heresy was to forbid any person of decency to communicate with him. That is Strait out of Zuckerberg and Dorsey’s play book. They canceled him! Basically closed his Twitter and Facebook accounts 500 years ago. There is history rhyming again.
Anyone who makes a claim and is unable to provide evidence to support that claim should be ridiculed. This should apply to people making claims of ‘transphobia’.
Nope, anybody who claims to be exposing a “phobia” or “ism” is automatically right about everything because of “lived experience”, “my truth” and “reasons”. Anybody who demands evidence is clearly a n*zi and will be singled out for cancellation, re-education, and the gulag.
Absolutely. Demanding evidence is itself evidence of “whiteness” (for which read racism), and misogyny.
An informative article.
It’s good to know there is still somewhere, South Sulawesi in this case, where these persecuted individuals can flee to seek safety and acceptance when the systemic transphobia prevalent across the western world gets too much for them.
Oh, to that commenter who insists on telling us the only reason people know what’s going on in the publishing industry is because UnHerd & Murray are amplifying an anonymous letter to The Bookseller…
To anyone who insists that cancel culture does not exist because Rowling’s books are still on sale…
Let me tell you how it is.
Not all of us novelists have J.K. Rowling’s platform (or her bank account). What we do have, however, is a growing and palpable fear of *ever* saying the wrong thing, of liking the wrong tweet, of writing the wrong comment. Our books are now examined with a microscope in the pre-publication stage. We are constantly warned by (some of) our editors that a benign reference ‘might be considered offensive by readers,’ when hardly a few years ago such a warning would have been laughed off.
We are one comment/tweet/reference/allegation away from de-publication and the end of our careers, some of which have only recently started.
I won’t hyperbolise by saying that we live in fear, but many of us do write in fear, which (unless I’m channeling my inner Stephen King and setting out to pen a horror story) is not an optimal condition in which to write fiction.
Consequence? Some of us slow down, go on hiatus, or stop writing altogether.
So, please, don’t tell me the situation Murray paints is exaggerated or nonexistent. It is very much neither of those, and my concern for the future of books is immense.
Ironically, I wrote a book about silencing half the population. It sold well because it made people angry. It sold well because many of my readers were terrified that the world I built might someday manifest itself. At the time, I laughed and said, “As if that would ever happen.”
I’m not laughing much now.
Christina, what a delight. I thought I recognised the plot that you described. I turned to my right and there was your name on the book that my wife has had for her bed-time reading. She likes it.
Just remind her not to judge the author by her book. 🙂
Perfectly true. The idea that Rowling is still being published therefore cancel culture does not exist is either fatuous or dishonest, depending on how much the person making the claim actually knows.
Gillian Philips is a children’s author who expressed support for Rowling. Not having Rowling’s clout, she was of course cancelled for that outrageous transgression.
Perhaps there is a gap in the market here then for a non-woke publisher to hoover up all those authors who would otherwise not get published or who these publishing houses would attempt to ostracise. We may then start to see the end of these silly stories where people who work at the houses claim to suffer PTSD from having their place or work publish such authors.
Before transitioning became such a cool and fun thing to do, trans people represented very roughly .5% of the population. A little Internet research suggests that people with cerebral palsy represent roughly 1% of the population.
Who is subject to more intense rejection and “phobia?” What is it like to have a perfectly well-functioning brain and yet to encounter awkwardness and outright rejection everywhere you go? (See the son of Walter White in “Breaking Bad.”)
There is lip-service to the problem of “ableism” on the Left, it is true, but there is no movement; there is no fury to dominate the public debate.
I point this out not to encourage a revolution from those suffering from the terrible malady, but to point out how ridiculous it is that this tiny sliver of people have come to monopolize the culture wars.
LGB people let them into the tent out of guilt, and also because they thought it would be good strategy just to add to their ranks, and it had something to do with “sex.” Otherwise they would be as high in the public consciousness as Albinos with Hepatitic C. LGBTQIAAHC+?
More like between 0.01 and 0.1% if the population.
Publishing and the wider arts seem determined to march, lock step, into a monoculture. There seems to be a basic conceit, which requires an unspeakable enemy to be confronted in all arenas, at all times. Perhaps publishing should refer back to that first novel, Cervantes’ Don Quixote. An insular reader of esoteric literature, mistakes windmills, sheep and serving wenches for dragons and fair damsels.
I didn’t think I should see the day when Wilbur Smith and Lee Childs would look like counter culture.
There seems to be a basic conceit, which requires an unspeakable enemy to be confronted in all arenas, at all times.
It was all there in Nineteen Eighty-Four, 72 years ago.
And that enemy is ‘woke’. An invented war to keep the masses on edge and ensure loyalty to the authority of Big Brother and the patriotic cause.
That’s my take from 1984.
An “invented war certainly” but Woke? There are other candidates.
I can venture, without much fear of error, that trans people get much more attention than their percentage of the population would warrant. I know of no person who has suggested a trans author should not be published but there are countless stories of people being canceled for not being in lockstep with the trans agenda. So much for the ‘tolerance’ of the self-appointed tolerant. My opinion is that people are free to live their lives as the wish but that doesn’t obligate everyone else to agree with it. Gender beyond the grammatical definition is relatively new. Sex in the biological context is not – it is chromosomal. You are born either XX (female) or XY (male). This is just part of that science we are always told we have to follow. This is not to say you have to live your life that way; hence the endless constellation of new genders. However, for those of us who understand and appreciate science, we should not be punished for recognizing it no more than a trans person should be punished for not adhering to someone else’s religious strictures. That is true tolerance.
I think most of the attention being paid to the ‘trans agenda’ comes from publications and commentators from the right/conservative/not progressive (however described) viewpoint.
I don’t see countless examples of people being cancelled for not being in step with the trans agenda. And I read left and right wing publications daily. I rarely see the issue of trans rights raised at all in the left wing publications but it crops up regularly in the right wing ones.
Your viewpoint seems perfectly reasonable to me and I’ve not heard of anyone being punished for understanding or following the chromosomal definition of sex.
J. K. Rowling is one of the most famous figure who they try to cancel.
As far as I know her books are still on sale and the films still being watched. People may disagree with her, they may decide they don’t want her to speak at their events. They may write awful things on Twitter – she is not cancelled. Thankfully.
Cancel culture is the phenomenon where people or entities in a position of power over an individual use that power to penalise the individual for opinions or actions that are perfectly lawful. This is usually done at the behest of an online mob.
(As a result, cancel culture can in many cases be summed up as “left-wingers demanding that bosses punish their workers for their opinions.)
Rowling’s books are so popular that she is in a position of power over her publisher, so she cannot be cancelled. Gillian Philips is a less well-known children’s author. She expressed support for Rowling’s position on the trans issue and was duly cancelled for it.
Now it must be said that very little of all this nonsense happens by accident…there is targeted funding of these small but noisy groups…follow the Money to see what is made to happen, buying influence and minds has never been cheaper ! Don’t waste any more time engaging with these non issues…do the homework and find the hidden hands behind the destruction of Western democracy and ask Cui Bono ?
And the answer is?
The lizards.
Of course Murray is right… The point is, why do we all put up with this tiresome, childish wokery from these people and their mates?
More and more, public discussion is based on a clear lie. We put up with the lie because we are too nice, and we hope to be able to steer things to a safer and more sensible haven later in the conversation. Maybe we need to say straightaway: ‘that is a lie’.
An example… This morning Mrs Sturgeon said “Glasgow Southside is the most diverse and multi-cultural constituency in Scotland – one of the many things that makes it so brilliant.”
That is either meaningless or a lie.
We don’t. I had no idea about this until I read it here. The Bookseller claimed circulation is 30,000 – most of whom probably read it for the industry gossip and job adverts. Now amplified via Unherd to another few thousand to promote the idea of a woke pandemic.
If only this wokery was just an esoteric hobby for the few. But it is not… Whole sectors of, particularly, the public sector are in thrall to it. For instance, everyday nonsense is being taught in schools and universities by teachers who do not believe what they teach, but are too polite or too afraid to refuse to teach it. Perfectly rational views are now stifled because they conflict with ‘the lived experience’ of groups that must be protected.
Examples please?
Why did the Indian consulate on Glasgow Southside move to Edinburgh when the Pakistani consulate moved into Glasgow Southside? Too much brilliance?
Does this mean the next time I buy certain titles at Waterstone’s, they may have to be wrapped in anonymous brown paper? Will I have to hide such literature under my Mackintosh? Will my purchase of such abhorrent filth have traumatised some of the sales staff?
Crikey, buying a book hasn’t been this much fun for a long time…….. now where are my pebble glasses?
It’s astounding how the media are not asking the right questions – the focus of the cognitive educated urban elite on woke issues does not have any traction with normal voters – how many times do the voters have to provide shock results like Madrid and Hartlepool for the commentariat to ‘get it’
I am finding that my very well educated and “progressive” friends know nothing of the WOKE movement and indeed are totally supportive of one media outlet that will never hire anyone who worked for Trump and totally support Twitter, et al throwing Trump under the bus.
They have been so indoctrinated by the MSNBC/CNN that they simply do not see the dangers we are heading into – or where we already are. I try to explain another view to my peril and would totally be thrown under the bus if I even mentioned that Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson often have something important to say. Indeed, Tucker has become the new Trump. John Oliver (and what the heck has happened to him) devoted an entire show to the evil that is Tucker.
It’s never the media’s fault. Always the “far-right on the march”.
Ooh, that Martin Luther comparison was deliciously scathing.
I wonder how long it takes when the West arrive the point that someone saying “It’s OK to be a straight” will be labeled as transphobia and cancelled.
it already carries the “cis” label, which is hard to see as complimentary.
History repeats etc. etc. Salem comes to mind as does the Inquisition…. Btw… isn’t ‘people of colour’ quite a racist term as ‘black’ is not a colour so has to be excluded from it….
We resemble more and more Revolutionary France. Convicted and executed by elites on a whim or for being the wrong sort of citizen.
Yes James, revolutions devour their own children….
Striking similarities with Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
To be pedantic, nether black nor white are colours. At least not in the spectrum.
Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain?
The use of Douglas Adams reminds me of a section in the Hitcher’s Guide to the Galaxy which might be a better way to think of this letter. In that section (narrated by the book) an intellectual summons God and explains to God that God cannot exist due to the existence of the Babel fish. God see’s the logic of the intellectuals argument and promptly disappears in a puff of logic. The intellectual then goes on to explain that white is blank and black is white before being knocked down at the next zebra crossing!
I hope the authors of the letter are very careful the next time they cross the road because they might fall pray to their own logic!
prey
Hitcher’s, see’s, intellectuals, blank, and, even more pedantically, Babel fish and due to, could also benefit from your red pen.
I find it closer to the beginning of the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The meeting where they are discussing burning down the forest to raise the value of leaves, and the all-important question when inventing the wheel, what color should it be.
‘grievance is an industry’ – I love that expression from an earlier correspondent. I work in publishing but thankfully not subject to the nonsense of the aggrieved and their po-faced collaborators.
despite an alarming future scenario I did enjoy the witty and excoriating demolition job by Douglas Murray.
OK I got confused with “signed anonymously”. Whilst I’m not thick I can see no way of achieving this. Personally I am dubious about anything signed by Donald Duck and I well remember having to sanitise a few petitions. I’m sure there is a real Donald Duck out there somewhere its just that I’ve never met him.
On a brighter note I’ve finally figured out how I will fit into this bright new trans world. I’m now a trans man – I’ve transitioned from being an old fashioned man to the brand new version. Yippeee.
Needed to be said. A huge bonus that Douglas Murray said it in such an excoriating and witty style. The sooner identity politics is old hat (démodé, as we say here), the better. I can stop wondering if I exclusively identify as a woman, an older woman, (too coy?), a heterosexual (though with age this is moot, which, by the way, I haven’t seen too much bla bla about), a retired osteopath, a feminist in rural France, a widow, a person with no natural offspring………….. you get the point.
All that matters is that you put the category of person you are ahead of being Kathryn Dwyer. After all the identity of you should revolve solely around your reproductive bits, the color of your reproductive bits, and the reproductive bits you are willing to touch to others reproductive bits.
I don’t quite get the point until you clarify your use of the word moot. Depending on whether you’re using its more modern common usage meaning or its traditional meaning, paints two vastly different pictures of your prevailing sexual situation – especially with your living in France, and all
If you own a couple cats it would help us in labeling you better, so do you?
…bit of a difference between “You are a bloke in a frock” and “Gas Chambers to the right, death by forced labour straight on, murderous medical experiments to the left”…had they not noticed? RSF
These are people brought up in a bubble, likely called their mother Hi tl*r if she took their phone.The sheer ignorance of these folk is astounding. But at some point they will drive the people and economy to some kind of civil war, and they will learn at last.
There was an ancient saying of ‘If you summon a demon, what are you going to do when it shows up?
This is unfair. You take an intellectual juggernaut in Murry and put him up against these over coddiled intellectual light weights and what would one expect. The carnage is delightful to witness…
Bien écrit. Bonne chance, alors!
Amazon have just dropped ‘Material Girls’ through the door for me. It would be interesting to know if Prof Stock had difficulty in finding a publisher or if ‘Fleet’ were subjected to any intimidatory measures..
Another excellent article and disturbing revelation by Douglas Murray.
I was encouraged to see the publishers of JK Rowling and Dr Petersons books refuse to submit to the bizzarre , contrived outrage of their woke crybully staff boycott/ censorship .
demands and tyranny.Comforting to see that despite their massive hate/ boycott/ defamation campaign against their non compliant targets here, the books and output are selling well.
The wierd arrogance and stupendous gall of woke staff factions trying to force employers to
adopt their particular political views and tactics is another unprecedented act of the progressive mob., amongst the many acts they do, but most reasonable , civil citizens would not.
With some encouragement and hope , just saying “”No” to the liberal left progressive tyrannical famatical mob will be a start to their eventual demise.
Jews were and are a religion, an old religion and transgender is a modern fad, and given its irrationality, a brief one.
Beyond that publishing today is profit-driven with no interest in quality of writing, and it is therefore agenda-driven. If you cannot wave some sort of agenda flag – sexuality, colour, culture, religion, race etc., then forget about being published. And, if you are older than forty, you will need one or more of the agendas to even get a look-in.
This is typical of the standard of excellent analysis for which we have come to rely on Douglas Murray. Thank you and more power to your elbow.
“Ah yes, the famously clear light of history which always bathes your own views in the most positive possible warm glow of righteousness” – I must write that down.
The historical knowledge of most left wing people seems to be limited entirely to “if we carry on like this we’ll end up like Nazi Germany” and “street protest movements have a long and glorious history”. The fact that the Nazis started off as a street protest movement is conveniently ignored.
What is also ignored is the way that many societies have collapsed into barbarism because a load of cynical know-nothings decided to deconstruct everything and lose faith in their own culture.
Simply unanswerable.
As woke means enlightened, I find Calvin a better example than Martin Luther. Calvin divided the world between those who had seen the light and the unenlightened unworthy remainder.
Criticiphobia.
Conservephobia.
Straightphobia.
Phobia of Transphobia.
Do we need these publishers with their own agendas? Could self-publishing be the answer?
The left wing tend to shy away from heavy industry or real private sector work, it’s either “public service” or light work which doesn’t get their dainty hands dirty, it’s no wonder they congregate round publishing/entertainment
Stop buying the books! Buy second hand books …. older books(before 1990) are much better edited as today’s publishers have stopped hiring line editors (the ones who correct spelling, grammar, etc., errors) and they don’t have have the publishers’ “apologies” for words or phrases that reflect their historical niche. New texts with missing words, wrong words, misspellings, character misidentifications annoy the heck out of me, especially when I’ve paid full price for the book. I picked up a new book not long ago and while this I g through the book, I noticed some of pages were bound upside down.
If readers simply begin demanding a well edited product (new works) and new editions of older works free from publishers’ intruding on the text with apologies for historically accurate texts that need no apologies, publishers will come to understand that their duty is to print a good/accurate text rather than apologizing for the text and its historical content. If a text needs explaining, then hire someone to write an introduction that sets out the historical milieu for the reader.
That the Buginese recognised 5 genders does not mean that they, or any other society, believed in gender identity, that identifying as a man is what makes you a man, and identifying as a woman makes you a woman. Gender identity is something made up by western progressives, and, as always, we are now busy forcing this belief on everyone else on the planet. We just can’t stop ourselves.
Mind you, if you are male the only way to get a job in publishing is to identify as female.
In my time I recall the publishing industry being dominated by nice upper class young women who left for the country early Friday afternoon and reappeared late Tuesday morning.
Trans activists and their allies are never going to be satiated no matter how much ground you yield to them. It is possible that tomorrow Drag show becomes a mandatory credit in the entire Britian’s school curriculum, female category is eliminated from all Sports and Sam Smith is elevated to King Smith, and yet Trans will be as much oppressed as much as Muslims were in Rotterdam where 100s of white teenage girls were sexually exploited by brown Islamists. Their demand will keep evolving as their gender.
Because while your objective is to provide an equally safe space to everyone regardless of who they are or who they think they are, their objective is simply not that, contrary to what they claim. They want total annihilation of everything that you have ever believed. You believed a family is man, woman and children; a daughter is fragile and son is strong; a mother is a woman and father is a man. They simply want you to erase all of this common sense because they are a sarcastic reminder to them of their lunacy. They feel attacked by even seeing you doing something as normal calling your daughter ‘daughter’.
This charade will continue so if you still haven’t lost your sanity grow a skin and grab a popcorn. This anticlimactic movie ain’t getting over soon.
For a hilarious story about just how much the publishing industry has twisted itself into knots to promote trans/indigenous/black/female/etc authors, read the story of Gwen Benaway on Quillette: https://quillette.com/2020/06/27/the-mob-that-came-after-me-is-turning-on-itself-when-will-this-end-who-does-this-help/
Excellent article as ever, Douglas.
We have seen this happening before . But, we’ve seen it in dictatorships, and even then and there, there was dissent and conformity was mantained through extreme oppression. What’s scary now is that this is happening in the most democratic societies in the world. My pet theory is that this is a product of the feminization of education, the avoidance of conflit at all costs, something that has been detrimental to both boys and girls. I do think the state should be completelly taken away from education, including universities. All state funding should be cut from liberal arts colleges.
Those of us who have studied history can see perhaps more clearly than many that the language and accusations against the trans community are ‘exactly’ those that have been used against: homosexuals, Jews, disabled people, people of colour, Muslims, suffragettes, even left-handed people in our past.
The next sentence in the letter: The language is very revealing: people will say that it upsets the natural order of things; there’s an implication of something monstrous; they’ll say that these people are dangerous; these people look different; they aren’t proper people somehow, not what they should be; it is just a phase, it is an illness.
Murray is selectively quoting disingenuously. The letter specifically references the language being used but Murray uses his next four paragraphs to explain why Trans people in publishing are not being treated like Jewish People in 1930’s or 1940’s Germany. But the letter didn’t say they were.
I don’t know why the letter quoted was written and agree it comes across as confused. I’m sure more people have read it thanks to Unherd than The Bookseller.
This is dishonest journalism from Murray, though. And he’s clever enough to know what he’s doing. Gets him his upticks and that’s what matters.
I think your last para is a little strong, but entirely agree with the rest of your comment here.
I share your horror at The Bookseller piece, but I think Mark B is quite right in his criticism of this article.
No, he’s not. We’re living in times where what were once considered whacky voodoo theories are now becoming hardline policies with serious social consequences for breaking them. It’s now more of a taboo to be a transphobe or racist than to be a murderer – maybe not in terms of hard punishment, but certainly in terms of decreased job prospects or publication opportunities. We only hear of the more famous cases, but this is going on everywhere. It’s amazing to me that some people aren’t able to see this. Just the other day, I had a friend who was made to include an LGBQT person in his novel even though he has no affinity with alternative lifestyles. I’m in the US so perhaps it’s more apparent here than in other places.
On submitting a manuscript to the publisher of four of my novels (one of which the BBC adapted as a two-part drama), I was asked to rewrite a character for no other reason than that the character was black. Apparently, some readers might have been offended if I ‘wrote’ a character who was black because I’m white. Fair enough, I thought, and killed her off.