It’s yet more extraordinary to remember that in the 20 days after this article was published on March 3, we witnessed a screeching media 180 from encouraging “business as usual” to near-universal calls for lockdown.
Over the period that followed, competing Covid claims and counter-claims were all larded with “experts” and “evidence”. Reviewing these now makes one thing clear: Austen’s assessment of TUA remains true. Moral consensus precedes rationalisation. The Covid vibe shift may have been presented as scientific and factual; but what powered it was a chaotic tangle of magical thinking, fear, and the threat of social ostracism. The statement made by epidemiologist Sir Mark Woolhouse to the Covid enquiry captures the social pressures boiling beneath the claimed objectivity: “The emphasis on consensus and clear messaging,” he said, “plus a sense of not wanting to ‘rock the boat’, made it difficult to discuss these issues openly at the time.”
No one likes being ignored, scorned, or shunned. No wonder so many Sensibles fall obediently into line on every TUA. Take TV presenter and quintessential Sensible Kirstie Allsopp, who last year waded vigorously into the what she called “the trans moral panic” on the Stonewall side. Her reward was a pat on the back from the Daily Stormer of gender woo, Pink News, for opinions “backed up by science and facts”. It’s more accurate, though, to describe her opinions as (at the time) robustly supported by the moral hive-mind that determines and then enforces the Truth Universally Acknowledged.
Here, again, the comparison with Austen is instructive. In Austen’s day, genteel moral consensus-formation happened within a social world of dinners, balls, picnics and other social events. Today, though, it’s been professionalised, via what author Matt Goodwin calls a “New Elite” comprising an “epistemic class” which dominates institutions such as TV, journalism, museums, charities and academia, and uses their influence to shape the public conversation in line with approved opinions.
And yet, in some respects, nothing has changed. For many of these elite women who, in Austen’s time, would be eyeing one another over their fans at Lady So and So’s, now work in New Elite industries, many of which are markedly female-dominated. Allsopp is a case in point: her parents are Lady and Baron Hindlip, and she is a Hon., though doesn’t usually use the title. She has parlayed old-elite status into National Telly Treasure status, whence she holds forth on moral issues with an unwavering moral certainty Austen would have recognised, and probably lampooned.
“Now the winds have changed, we find Kirstie Allsopp back-pedalling.”
So, now the winds have changed, we find Allsopp also back-pedalling. It was never true, she asserts, that there was “no debate” on the issue of medical experiments on gender-confused children. Puberty blockers, Kirstie informs us, were bad all along. But we could always talk about it: “it is, and always has been possible to debate these things and those saying there was no debate are wrong”. All the people (mostly women) unfairly fired or bullied out of jobs, all the grannies punched in Hyde Park by men with special identities, the no-platforming, the intimidation, the threats, and the censorship — that wasn’t actually a thing.
Allsopp is the clearest indicator yet that at least where child gender vivisection is concerned, at least some of the grandes dames of Truth Universally Acknowledged may have paused broadcasting a TUA in order to convince themselves, in the light of a new emerging groupthink, that the new consensus is what they believed all along. And because moral consensus precedes its “expert” rationalisation, so we also find that those who purport to stand for science and reason are also curiously quiet.
On Sunday, for example, Sex Matters founder Maya Forstater (herself notoriously a victim of the “No Debate” consensus Kirstie Allsopp says never existed) called on science communicator and Humanists UK president Adam Rutherford to defend systematic scientific reviews, against the trans activists spreading misinformation about the Cass Review. Did he come out swinging for science and reason over gender ideology? Reader, he flunked it: “It’s not something I know much about.”
Last November, Humanists UK welcomed a Private Members’ Bill banning “conversion therapy” — in a formulation that would, in effect, ban anything but the “affirmation” approach to gender identity, recently decried by the Cass Review as unsupported by evidence and potentially harmful to children whose sense of self is still developing. Perhaps Rutherford is waiting, as many commentators did during Covid, until it becomes obvious which Truth Universally Acknowledged was always obviously supported by the evidence.
We can hardly blame him. I don’t doubt his vaunted commitment to even uncomfortable scientific truth. But if Covid taught us anything, it’s that scientific truth can be — with the best of intentions — somewhat ductile, especially weighed against the risk of ostracism by every desirable dinner-party hostess in medialand. But should those hostesses resume broadcasting their TUA, having agreed that they always believed puberty blockers were bad, perhaps the Rutherfords of our public discourse will feel able to hop back in the trenches on behalf of science, objectivity, and Dr Hilary Cass.
Overall, though, no lessons will be learned. None was learned from Covid, for all that Woolhouse described the lockdown policy bluntly as a “failure”. Not even a recent report showing the appalling and preventable harm lockdowns did to a generation of children seems to have prompted much soul-searching among those who advocated loudest for such measures.
And this is because the unhappy inference is that we’re still stuck in the same paradigm: the chattering-class two-step of moral groupthink masquerading as science. Just like Johnson in 2020, we’re still looking to “experts” as a means of outsourcing moral judgement — and as someone to blame when things go wrong. Even Hunt, on whose watch Stonewall helped entrench gender ideology in public health, is now busy describing her “regret” at having naively “trusted the experts”.
In truth, though, “experts” are a front for the TUA: the chattering-class moral consensus. And this is manufactured by people who care less about being right than looking virtuous. Career moral entrepreneurs such as Hunt; vacuous grandes dames such as Allsopp; “communicators” such as Rutherford whose job is to make consensus look sciency. Downstream of their posturing, children were irreversibly harmed. They didn’t care; they wanted to look kinder than you. They should not be allowed to forget how wrong they got it.
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SubscribeWell, bravo!!
Managing to make a cogent argument comprising Austen and Hunt is quite a feat.
The TUA is going to be my new… Truth Universally Acknowledged. 😀
Joking apart, it is SO true we have learnt nothing from what happened in the last 5 years or so. You would expect us/leaders/mankind to make the same mistakes over and over again, but not in such quick succession.
Super skewer from Mary here; this is like the post-Holocaust denial mechanisms; ‘nobody knew what was happening ‘,’we didn’t really think he was serious’,’I did my best to stand up to it’,’some of my best friends are….’ .etc etc etc
It’s the breakneck speed that’s modern, however; it used to take years for people to slide from one position to the opposite, but now with the Internet, it can take place in seconds. They’ll all be busily cleansing their twitter and email accounts as we speak.
It was far funnier in the old days; when Indira Gandhi was about to be arrested for corruption, she was obliged to grandstand for the TV cameras at the the front door of the official residence while servants shredded government documents in the kitchen with cheese graters.
In lieu of any tangible achievements, the mediocre and malicious have seen an opportunity for coin and cachet in competitive caring. I wonder what next season will bring.
I wonder (and Mary did seem to ‘allude’ to this in her essay) how much of this TUA can be attributed to the increasing feminisation (competitive caring) of public life, or is another TUA, that men and women think, and rationalise, in exactly the same way ?
It’s an important point, usually overlooked. University-educated, middle-class women are far more prone to push for policies which have ‘compassion’ as their primary motivation. And university-educated, middle-class men, eager to display their feminist credentials, will generally fall into step with their female co-cohorts.
I remember some prediction years ago that ‘The Future is Feminine ‘ and everyone was overjoyed at closing the door on all that ‘toxic masculinity’.
But as the Buddhists say, we always have 42 problems; they’re just different problems now.
Never mind the fact that Putin, Xi Jinping and the radical Islamists are unaccountably far less inclined to feminise themselves.
42 problems? Now where have I heard that number before? Somehow related to “life, the universe, and everything”. I feel a bit smarter now.
There’s truth in this – but on many issues compassion could be claimed by both sides. It’s more about taking the side of those most easily portrayed as victims – indeed as group victims.
Very few women want to do dirty and dangerous engineering- mining, oil, construction, agriculture, etc so are unaware of the qualities needed to overcome obstacles. Being battered by waves or having to escape collapsing excavations appeals to very few women.
We already know: they’ve coopted the cause of a genocidal people wanting to end the only Jewish state in the world as their ‘Free Tibet’ moment. (As if there were any comparison between Palestinians and the peaceful Tibetans)
Excellent, well written essay!!! How I have come to hate the phrases “follow the science” and “science denier.” They are worthless words used to beat people across the head and crush all debate. The cry bullies who use these words will never be held to account.
The whole point is that ‘following the Science’ isn’t Science: memorising facts, recipes, isn’t Science.
It isn’t Engineering either! 🙂
Exactly! You don’t “follow” science, you DO science. Following is for cults. You “follow” cults. The Covid Cult, the Transhuman Cult, the Climate Crisis Cult. The CRT Cult.
Yes. But do not forget the antivaxx cult, the zinc-and-vitamin-D cult, the ‘it -is-all-a-conspiracy-for-the-great-replacement’ cult etc. There are the same mechanisms all over. The point is that some of these ‘cults’ fit pretty well with the actual science (like the climate crisis one) and others do not.
BTW, why are Cathode Ray Tubes subject of a cult? 😉
Totally agree. People are surely more complex than just fitting into one box. I was unsure about Brexit, but I think that we humans very probably are having a deleterious effect on the climate. I was sceptical about lockdowns & found the govt’s fear campaign appalling, I think that both Palestine and Israel are as bad as each other in this continual hatred of each other, whoever ‘started’ it, and I am on neither side in the current conflict – just horrified at the destruction and human suffering. And I reject as completely anti-reality the notion of self-id & that humans can change sex.
Not everyone fits the clearly defined political strictures of ‘right’ & ‘left’. We are large, we contain multitudes.
This is the problem exactly. What is the anti-vaxx cult? By creating this label, you are effectively refusing to acknowledge dissenting opinions. The vast majority of people were not opposed to vaccines, they were opposed to forcing people to take the vaccines, especially young, healthy people. I don’t recall anyone saying vitamin D would prevent covid, yet we should have all been taking it because vitamin D boosts your natural immune system.
I do recall people (on Unherd) claiming that you did not need vaccines, let alone lockdown or masks, because natural immunity, with extra Zinc, vitamin D and possibly with Ivermectin was amply enough to keep anyone safe. I also recall people having (what I would call) an exaggerated fear of vaccine side effects, built on (what I would call) some very thin and biased analysis of any data that came to hand, and an unrealistically low expectation of vaccine advantages. Remember, all the ‘this is not a vaccine, this is an untested drug’ people?
The ‘anti-vaxx cult’ is certainly no less real than the ‘COVID Cult’ or the ‘Climate Crisis Cult’ that Amy Harris talks about. And that I accepted, for the sake of argument. I’ll accept that a lot of opinions are made *before* you start analysing the arguments, on both sides of the divides. If you are willing to face up to how much you do not know, and make a realistic analysis of the known data, your opinions are fine. If you start out being certain you are right and cherry-picking data to suit you will never be more than a cult.
Didn’t most of that turn out to be true in the end? Wasn’t Covid an illness that was only dangerous for the elderly and the unwell? Weren’t masks proved to be pointless? Wasn’t the vaccine proved incapable of slowing the spread of the virus? Didn’t cost of us get it once way or another, sometimes more than once in the end, whether “vaccinated” or not? Wasn’t natural immunity after suffering the illness proved to be as effective if not better than vaccine-induced antibody production? Aren’t there now many unanswered (and maybe unanswerable) questions about the possible link between the gene therapy shots and the rise in cancers, heart problems and excess deaths in different societies? We’ll probably never know the exact truth
There is a lot of things we do not know. But there are also a lot of holes in what you say.
If you have a reliable way of determining whether any rise in excess deaths (once it has been proven) is due to people having COVID, getting vaccinated, or the NHS not screening properly for a while, you need to apply for a very large research grant.
Nobody ever proposed that vaccination gave *better* immunity than getting the disease; the point was that vaccination reduced the risk of dying or getting damaged the first time you got it, and slowed down the spread so people got it later. Remember ‘flattening the curve’?
And, just for completeness, your talking about ‘gene therapy’ is exactly the same trick that the trans people use when talking about ‘pregnant men’ etc.
There is more, but this will do. I do not claim that we know particularly clearly what happened, let alone what would have happened. If you know of reliable evidence, please point us to it. If not, you are free to promote any opinion you like, but could you please stop assuming that your bubble opinion is by definition right?
“ Nobody ever proposed that vaccination gave *better* immunity than getting the disease; the point was that vaccination reduced the risk of dying or getting damaged the first time you got it, and slowed down the spread so people got it later. Remember ‘flattening the curve’?”
No offence, but almost all of this untrue. We were explicitly told the vax was better than natural immunity. We were also told vaccines were the only way to achieve herd immunity, first with 60% vax rates, then 70% and 80%. They said this knowing that Pfizer never even tested for transmission.
I do not remember that claim – and it is so outlandish that I surely would have noticed it. I suppose it depends on what you mean by ‘natural immunity’. If you mean that being vaccinated protects you better from future disease than having had the disease, it is not quite impossible but highly unlikely (and would need a lot of evidence). If by ‘natural immunity’ people mean ‘I never had COVID, but my immune system is so strong (and I take so much vitamin D) that I am inherently protected’ then, absolutely, vaccination is a lot better.
Do you have a link, so we know which claim we are discussing?
As for ‘herd immunity’ that (as I guess you know) means that the vulnerable are safe because just about everybody is immune and unable to pass the disease on. Regrettably that seems to be impossible for COVID, because the immunity fades too quickly no matter how you got it. But again, if the goal is to prevent people from getting sick, a strategy that relies on everybody getting the disease sounds rather counterproductive, compared with vaccination.
You don’t remember people being forced to get vaccines even though they already had Covid? That the vaccine provided better protection than the natural immunity acquired by having the illness? This was a major issue for 18 months.
I do not, actually. Does not mean it could not have happened. It does sound a little strange. Could you give a link, or maybe some details of place and context, that I could use to find one? I could try to come up with explanations for what might have been behind it, but it would be easier if I understood more precisely what the context was.
Do an internet search for Dr. Fauci explains why COVID-19 vaccines work much better than natural immunity to protect you from the coronavirus
Ah! It is not a question of vaccination providing better protection than previous disease – which would be quite unexpected, even if it could be true in some special cases. It is a question of previous disease plus vaccination, providing better protection than previous disease alone. Which is really much like saying that vaccination plus a later booster shot gives better protection than vaccination without a later booster shot. Nothing strange there at all – and certainly not about vaccination giving ‘*better* immunity than getting the disease‘. Sorry – I have been a bit thick here, I should have understood that from the wording of your posts.
Thanks for the info, btw.
Without being into the details of COVID immune responses it seems pretty clear that whether you get it from disease or from vaccination, protection is less than 100% and dies away over time. That is not the case for most of the diseases we vaccinate against, at least not to nearly the same extent – which probably distorts our thinking. So vaccinating even those who have had the disease already should, yes, improve their immunity and their protection. Whether the benefit is worth the cost of more vaccinations is of course a legitimate question, but if you think, like me, that vaccination is a normal, low-risk thing that is highly unlikely to be worse to you than catching COVID, the downside of getting vaccinated really should not be that significant.
So, coming back to Jane Hewlands original point, I fully accept that the immunity you get from just getting sick – while partial and temporary – will almost always be better than the immunity you get from just vaccination. It is just that if the goal is to keep you from getting sick, using disease to get immunity kind of defeats the object.
But Dr. Fauci’s statement was amplified into you have to get the vaccine anyway, even if you had Covid. Natural immunity is not good enough.
My point is vaccines were good. Mandates were bad. And the justifications for forcing young, healthy people to get vaxxed were absurd and even dishonest.
Well, having had COVID does not make you immune (whether you call it ‘natural immunity’ or not). And getting an additional vaccination gives improved protection. But the important point here is that vaccination not only protects your own health, but also reduces the risk to others by transmission. Neither effect is perfect, but both are there. So there are two discussions here: One is how the magnitude of the improvement (to yourself or in the risk to others) compares to the cost and risk – whether it is worth it, in short. That is a matter of facts and trade-offs, which could be argued relatively calmly. The other question is philosophical: whether you think it is right to demand that people get vaccinated (or change their behaviour) not to benefit themselves, but to benefit others. Or whether people have an absolute right to determine their own behaviour, whatever the cost to others might be.
I’m afraid many of your points have rather large holes in them. If you were willing to do a little more research you may not feel quite so dogmatic about this.
The Daily Sceptic has a vast archive of material and references from people who have done the work. Who are qualified to have an opinion worth considering. Who do have a different opinion from those who you’re listening to.
As for your claim that no one ever proposed the vaccine offered better protection than getting the illness, I suggest again, you do a little more research. You are in effect doing a bit of “Kirsty” here. You’re making Mary Harringtons’ point for her.
Sorry, but if you know of some good and convincing arguments, link me to the best of them, and I shall try to find the time to look and evaluate them. Instructing me to do a vast amount of research just suggests that you do not have anything convincing to hand. I am not going to do enough research for a bl**dy masters thesis just to check whether a group of people that I have no reason to trust just might have some good evidence.
I’m not your researcher son. Spend some time on the site I mentioned, maybe half an hour. See if you find anything that makes you question your dogmatic position. Or listen to a long form podcast with a well known skeptic. One where you actually get to hear there views, rather than one where you get to here the views of those who you normally listen to. Pick a well known name, a well known skeptic. You may find yourself wanting to read or listen more. You may not. But at least you’ll have tried.
Then at the very least you might be able to articulate the views of those you disagree with rather than just trying to use them as a means to elevate yourself.
You cannot be bothered to argue for your position, so you expect me to do all the work required to prove that you are right. Sounds like “Why I have stopped talking to white people about race” – granddad. Not biting, sorry.
Go to the top of the class, Jane!
There were a lot of opinions out there for sure. Some people I respect questioned the safety of vaccines, but this was only a small strand of people. The vast majority of heretical thinkers were opposed to the mandates, not the vaccines themselves. Even people who questioned the safety of vaccines still believed they helped elderly people and those with compromised health.
Widen your Overton window, Jim. The truth lies outside the space you’re currently looking in!
Of course vitamin D Prevents you getting Coronavirus!! It supports the immune system. And plenty of people were absolutely against the toxic untested drugs marketed as “Covid vaccines”. Sorry if you got conned into taking one.
Vitamin D doesn’t prevent you from getting Covid. It boosts your immune system. I take 2500 units a day and it doesn’t prevent me from getting a cold. I got the double vax because I was 58 years old with heart issues in the family. I wasn’t conned. I made a choice with the information available to me at the time. My 22 year old son didn’t get the vax and I supported that decision even though he was living at home at the time.
Hurrah! Another troll outted. The antivaxxers are the new anti-smokers – soon to be proved absolutely right. Future generations will look at the practice of “vaccination” with the same horror that we look at “blood letting” or lobotomy with. Electric shock “therapy” anyone?!
It must be nice to know the future – I am unfortunately limited to the present. But you are welcome to join me under my bridge for a cup of river water.
The ‘transgender’ cult…
As soon as someone uses the word ‘denier’ in relation to any topic, I know that they have been captured by ‘groupthink’.
Like Holocaust denier?
Holocaust denial was the original denial, and because it was demonstrably false, it inspired others to attach the word ‘denier’ to anyone who questioned their pet theory, however unverified.
The suffix ‘-phobia’ (used now in ways that bear no relation to its meaning in Greek of ‘fear’ or ‘panic’) is likewise used to smear all sorts of other sentiment through linking them to the ur-phobia, ‘homophobia’. (Which unlike holocaust denial was a dubious concept at best in the first place).
So now we have ludicrous and widely disparate and sometimes frankly stupid usages such as ‘Israelophobia’ (for everything from people who hate Jews and want to sweep them into the Med, down to anyone not 100% in agreement with all Israel policy, ever), ‘transphobia’ (basically people who are skeptical of gender-woo), and Islamophobia (often applied to those angered by blatant and ever-expanding censorship of public discussion or criticism of the less savoury aspects of Islam, though to be fair it’s arguably the only genuine fear among these new coinages – who wouldn’t be fearful of religious zealots carrying a rusty combat knife, or indeed of a baying mob backed by actual terrorists forcing you out of a job for showing a few cartoons?).
You are right on the usage of -phobia, but I think you are wrong on the history of the word. I guess the established modern use was in the meaning of ‘visceral, irrational fear of’, as in claustrophobia, or arachnophobia, which are arguably objective medical conditions. The first extension I can think of would be ‘xenophobia’. That is supposed to be an exaggerated dislike and repulsion without rational justification, but no one is suggesting that people freeze in panic when they see a foreigner. Homophobia, I’d say, came after that, and the new meaning is any dislike or negative reaction which the speaker thinks is wrong and wants to delegitimise.
I don’t want to let Allsop and the rest off the hook on this one.
“Educate yourself” and “the right side of history” are two other phrases (usually delivered with impregnable self-righteousness) that I’d gladly never hear again as long as I live.
I find the latter phrase intensely irritating; as if history is somehow imbued with a sense of moral purpose. Also “my lived experience” – is there any other type? and “personal truth” – yet another. It is the language of the anencephalate illiterati.
Yes, may those of us ‘ordinary’ plebs (low social hierarchical standing by comparison) of society who always believed this was an abomination and was ostracized for it – take great delight in watching these ‘elites’ squirm. Nasty, I know, but great never-the-less…… Unfortunately, that glow of delight is marred by a genuine grief at what has been collectively done to so many children. It’s the children I grieve for. That they look to adults for advice and direction, to be so ravaged by a false, dangerous and sadistic violation of human body integrity, to the deranged adult desires of such a few – still beggars belief. I do hope that the doctors who supported and promoted this atrocity get come-comeuppance with being sued by de-transitioners. Noting all the while, that no amount of money can or could compensate for the frankenstien horror of what was willing done to them.
It has been a cruel lesson indeed. It definitely exposed collective apathy and reticence in the face of such horror.
Beautifully written. Again.
I take a slightly different position. I am in no sense a “trans activist”, and am at heart largely ambivalent on the topic. However, I sometimes find myself ostensibly agreeing with their position, because I know it annoys the Christians.
The enemy of your enemy is your friend?
History shows this to bea disastrous policy.
I am happy for history to judge me on it.
It’s more a “sport” kind of thing. Annoying the smug and sanctimonious is my hobby. To provide balance, I also annoy the Green Left about climate change.
Are you under 16?
More like under 12.
Hmmm…not so sure it always does, Martin. There’s an awful lot of overlap between the aims and motivations of the anti-‘TERF’ bigots and the aims and motivations of the worst of the religious bigots. Both tend to be profoundly misogynist/anti-feminist.
They are actually anti-human. Potential mass murderers.
Beings ready to become side by side with Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot
You forgot to include Putin.
Possibly, but I dislike the latter more than the former. Plus, the latter have been around for far longer.
Hunt is a committed Christians. I am about to get off a bus and walk past a church festooned with trans flags. Open your eyes and grow up.
As. Christian I embarrassed we were more bothered about being trendy and accepted than speaking up for the vulnerable.
Remind me when your lot last “spoke up for the vulnerable”.
Not a Catholic Church, I imagine?
Soooo…you’re OK with mutilating kids because it annoys Christians? Christians are also pretty against pedophelia, so….
The term “mutilating kids” is pejorative. It ranks with “murdering babies” when discussing abortion (Hint: I am pro-abortion). If Christians are against paedophilia, why do so many clergymen in Christian churches practise it?
Hospitals are against killing people but sometimes it happens.
Churches are composed of thousands or tens of thousands of individuals some will inevitably do bad things – it doesn’t mean they aren’t against paedophilia.
Why does the Catholic Church do its level best to cover up the activities of its paedophile priests then?
Haha – it’s not a great reason – but an understandable one. And to be honest, it can be a stimulus to thought, so can be useful even if badly motivated. We need gadflies!
Thank you.
What an odd thing to say. One can hardly pass a CoE church these days whose tower or pulpit is unadorned by some trans flag or rainbow banner. And that ineffable oaf, Welby, seems delighted to prostrate himself at the altar of whichever virtue signalling nonsense is currently the saveur du jour.
I don’t have a particular problem with the Anglicans for that reason. They seem to have abandoned being a “religion” some time ago. Let me know when the Vatican starts displaying rainbow banners, and I’ll find another hobby.
So what you are saying is (to coin a phrase) you know you are a complete plonker, but you enjoy it all the same?
Well, the term “plonker” is pejorative. You are of course entitled to think me one, but I (obviously) don’t think myself one. I have always had a hearty dislike for the smug and holier-than-thou, and let’s face it, that description fits a lot of Christians. As I have previously said, I have much the same reaction towards the Green Left, and their Climate Change Cult.
To take up a position because it annoys a group you dislike is very childish.
Opinion noted, but as I say, I am entitled to a hobby.
sadly it will de facto be the taxpayer getting sued for the Tavistock nonsense, not individual doctors
Somebody called Martin M made a response to this post, and I have been blocked from replying to it. Is anybody else experiencing a similar problem?
Martin M commented:
“ I take a slightly different position. I am in no sense a “trans activist”, and am at heart largely ambivalent on the topic. However, I sometimes find myself ostensibly agreeing with their position, because I know it annoys the Christians.”
My response was:
“Are you against Christians or Christianity? Christians are always deeply flawed people trying to follow an ideology of perfection and repeatedly failing. The fact that some blame their stunted view of perfection on their ideal should not detract from the substance or meaning of that ideal.”
Unherd bot replied (in Red!) “Sorry, responses to unapproved comments are not allowed “
Perhaps Unherd needs to employ a more Unherd robot…
Ah. Fair question. I have a beef with individual Christians only when they try to impose their views on me (and I have a similar beef with anyone who tries that, Christian or otherwise). If they can avoid doing that, I am fine with them (and I have any number of friends who are Christians, and both my parents were Christians also). The Church is a different matter (and when I say “the Church”, I guess I am nowadays mostly referring to the Catholic Church).
And how is the Catholic Church trying to impose themselves? Is your mum insisting you go to mass?
Various members of my family have been Christian, but none have been Catholic (not for the last three generations anyway). The Catholic Church opposes abortion. That alone raises my ire.
I think Martin M is a teenager.
In fact, I am 61 years of age.
I was secretly against trans while I was fanatically supporting it. /sarc
It’s transactivism that was the problem, not trans per se.
Edit: Mary Harrington isn’t “anti-trans” and her article doesn’t refer to those who’re genuinely, as adults, transitioners.
True!
There are no ‘genuine transitioners’. There is only body mutilation and stereotype cross-dressing. No human can have any idea what it is to be the opposite sex. It can only ever be a pale imitation that perhaps assuages a fetishistic idea of ‘being female’. There are worse fetishes, it’s true, but this one has now come out of the bedroom and into schools to indoctrinate and groom children. And it has been found out.
So if a man wants to cross-dress, who cares? Centuries ago men were the peacocks in ‘gaudy plumage’ anyway, and last century Bowie did it fabulously. But he and they never pretended they were women. It always was simply adornment. The difference is now they want to pretend they actually ARE women.
Surely the answer to even your last sentence is “Who cares?”
Someone needs to tell Martin’s parents he’s up past his bedtime.
Thank you. If the initial ridiculous fallacy of trangenderism had been rejected, than all of this insanity would have been avoided. And thousands of children would never have been mutilated.
Jane’s and yours is the only ridiculous fallacy of “transgenderism ” that exists. You are child abusing imbeciles who variously pretend gender does not exist physically, or, that is always magically perfectly congruent to the sex of a person — although the tissues involved develop on th basis of differing hormonal cues at differing times in the duration of a pregnancy.
There are next to no such “mutilated” children, as the false positive rate for people diagnosed per WPATH standards of care for gender affirming care is below 1%.
Why you and Jane want to force any boys to have breasts and periods and to force any girls to have beards and deep voices is the question.
If it’s genuine, it’s a genuine mental illness which should be treated, not indulged.
Nah, you have to respect diversity….
Outstanding essay. When Mary Harrington is on form, she’s peerless.
She really does have a gift for the written word.
It’s outstandingly written as always, yet totally misguided in her comparisons with covid response. When there is a crisis such as that then a consensus is needed quickly – park for a moment whether the correct decisions were made – if people are dying then there is not the luxury of open debate and enquiry, people had to make tough decisions on the information to hand.
That’s a completely different scenario to the trans debate.
There was NO crisis!
And much public money, +pensions and benefits, was spent planning for such an eventuality, and the plans were thrown away so the sheep could panic.
And it happened across many Western countries: what a coincidence!
“Climate crisis” is exactly the same playbook.
Don’t be silly Amy, 25 million people died.
Well now I know you’re a troll! People die. They died of pneumonia. They always do. This wasn’t a “novel” virus. It was discovered in the 1950s and is identical to influenza in every way. I don’t interact with trolls so I will take care not to interact with your account again.
Wow.
You deserved that Robbie by descending to calling Amy ‘silly’ and cutting off debate
It was novel in that it didn’t exist in nature but was instead deliberately manufactured in a Chinese lab with illegal gain-of-function American tax dollars. The panic was driven by world governments and their media to serve two purposes: control the populace and enrich the powerful.
Commenters like Robbie refuse to believe the fact that the WHO conducted Event 201 in October 2019 to war game the exact scenario, and implemented it in January 2020. All this is known. The people responsible knew it from the very beginning (which is why they only put on their silly masks for the cameras).
I don’t give a rat’s about idiots who still cling to their Covid fantasies, but I DO care that those who perpetrated this global crime have not been made to pay. I want them tried and prosecuted – at the very least.
So what you’re saying is, you have no interest in debate, you’re happy to stifle opposing voices and you subscribe to a truth universally acknowledged. Curious; I was reading an article about that very thing earlier.
Why debate someone who’s so obviously blind to facts. Like you.
“What you’re saying is”. No. I was very clear that I don’t give a rat’s about the opinions of those who refuse to acknowledge facts. That’s not “stifling voices”. That’s ignoring them.
At last, someone who has grasped the facts and had the courage to state them. Some people commenting on this site are unbelievably naive about the world they live in. And thank you Mary too for outing the selfish and the cowardly. Spot on once again!
Amy you are a troll yourself! Have you act spoken with anyone suffering with long Covid? You should. It’s rather more than flu. Maybe read something?
Only last month the government / medical council published a new study that there is no such thing as a long Covid! If you have the occasional sneeze or cold it is because the other viruses (include Covid) are still around. Long Covid is an excuse for people not to go back to work. It is also an excuse to claim benefits.
They have ME, obviously, not something made up to cover for government failings.
FoI request, 17,000 died of Covid in the UK. People who had a variety of illnesses died as it does with flu. In 1968/69 , 88,000 died of flu.
Fake news Charles. That’s not how death certificates work. But I suspect you do actually know this.
Now you are talking – dying with or from? In any event, now we know doctors were pressured and some brainwashed into endorsing Covid as the cause of death. These doctors admit it now. Anonymously of course.
People die all the time. No one with half a brain is unaware they attributed every death to Covid even when it wasn’t. For crying out loud stop excusing this coordinated catastrophe otherwise it will happen again. Maybe you’d support that, who knows.
Rubbish. Covid killed 7 million – check the WHO data if you care. Also recording errors could be a high as 50% since in many instances anyone who had covid and later died was recorded as have died of covid, so somewhere between 7m and 3.5m. In other news 60m die every year, 14.5% from infectious diseases (excluding covid) – that’s 8.7m – but there are no lockdowns or generalised hysteria for influenza, pneumonia, typhoid etc.
Mary was writing about YOU Robbie.
No Tom, unlike others here I am happy to debate.
According to WHO?
Exactly. A war is a crisis. COVID lasted more than 2.5 years!!!
Perhaps for the first 2-3 weeks at the most, not 2-3 YEARS (and I still see some people going around masked).
Yet here we are 5 years later, with the benefit of hindsight and much debate and enquiry, and there still is no consensus.
There is. It’s just not mentioned in polite circles because who’s going to admit to being so wrong? Which is kind of the point if the article.
Well please go ahead and enlighten us.
“Consensus” is a red herring. There never could be consensus about such a thing. There was no consensus in the US about declaring war on Hitler. Or about Prohibition, or the Inter-State Highways or day-light savings time or the best way to tie a bow-line or feed a baby or…
And, in this case, there wasn’t much debate. The panic-stricken classes made sure of that. Just like the global warming story.
And I still see some people going around, sneezing in crowded trains and buses and rarely a handkerchief in sight.
Whenever I see someone wearing a mask OUTDOORS, I feel pity for him/her. The Covid behavioural unit got another victim!
A thought experiment for you: instead of the Covid pandemic happening in 2020, imagine it had happened in 2000. The feasibility of vast numbers of people working from home would not have been possible, and the entire model of lockdown/WFH if possible/furlough etc would be unworkable, because without sufficient numbers of businesses carrying on, no money would be coming in to support helicopter money drops etc. Had the Covid pandemic happened in 2000, do you think the same consensus would have formed?
Good idea. Modern technology clearly made lockdown easier for people to still keep productive and connected. Quarantine is a natural response to such a crisis however and history provides examples going back to the 14th century with government mandates during the bubonic plague. It’s worth noting that whilst quarantine was effective, it was always received negatively by many who considered it a punishment.
One example paper. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22611587/
Quarantine doesn’t work for airborne respiratory viruses, and never has. That’s why they’ve never been recommended in any pandemic plans. Comparisons with Medieval plagues are meaningless.
People didn’t know what was causing the plague at the time, they knew quarantine worked however. Let’s face it, it’s kind of obvious that not mixing with other people is going to reduce disease spread no matter how it functions. I’m uncertain how one can argue otherwise.
No. Ditto 1968, when there was a coronavirus epidemic that killed 100,000 people and got barely any media coverage at all, much less the panic-stricken hysteria that accompanied COVID.
Before answering the above question, check over how China dealt with the pandemic as compared to, say, South Korea.
The Chinese approach is something which could have been applied in 2000 and if there would have been difficulties doing that in the UK that’s for other reasons than infotech. South Korea, on the other hand, exploited Infotech potential in ways that could in principle have been applied in the UK but weren’t . But by the same token, wouldn’t have been much less available in 2000. Even there.
Very good point!
But there was plenty of time after the first lockdown was imposed to notice (as Prof David Paton did) that infections had peaked: plenty of time to question whether the response was necessary (as Prof Heneghan did); plenty of time to consider or less harmful alternatives to locking us up. (as Prof Gupta did). There was plenty of time to reflect on how we were turning into small minded, bitter finger pointers for whom the sole point of life is to stay alive. But we didn’t use it. We used it to shout down dissent. Just as Mary describes it.
Yet there was wide support for the policies that were chosen, including the political opposition.
To look back on Covid two years later and not acknowledge any govt failures is gobsmacking. The pandemic response lasted more than two years. Surely there was time for debate somewhere within that time frame. Trudeau was ruthless in his response to the truckers protests and refused to meet with them. Yet three months later almost all restrictions in Canada were lifted within three months. In three months we went from truckers killing grandma to the end of restrictions.
Ahh you do love creating an entirely new narrative Jim, this one is a beauty, well played.
There is no consensus in the Scientific Method. The facts are repeatable and speak for themselves or they aren’t. This idea of a quick consensus is precisely what the woke Leftists use to force their end justifies the means agenda on the rest of us.
Totally agree. At the start of covid however there were no facts, and no data to base the scientific method on, obviously.
Bullshit. Gain of function research conducted by Eco Health Alliance in the US under the NIH (run by one Dr Anthony Fauci) came to light in 2014. After a period of public outrage to this insanity, the research was quietly outsourced to a lab in Wuhan, where safety protocols where lax, to put it mildly. When COVID-19 broke out worldwide, Fauci and other guilty parties (along with their toadies in the media) pressured and intimidated scientists into discarding the ‘lab leak theory’ substituting the ‘wet market’ narrative to cover their Instrumental role in creating this disaster. And you think these people should have been trusted?
It’s different but it’s still comparable in the way the usual suspects reacted and lined up.
Most importantly she makes us smile? At least for a little bit. Only when we try to join in the conversation ourselves are we unhappy again?
I’d be very happy to have her take up any cause I believed in.
Seconded. My only quibble is that, in all this discussion, there is not enough acknowledgement that this problem of rigid middle class groupthink originates almost entirely in the universities. My acquaintances who are graduates are overwhelmingly more likely to hold the currently orthodox opinion – unsupported by much in the way of factual knowledge or coherent argument – on any topic than those who are not.
Very good point. I’ve noticed that too.
It makes you wonder what education is for.
Enriching the professoriate. Next question.
Enriching some of them, perhaps. Many of them are adjuncts, woefully underemployed and underpaid.
Dreadfully true..!
Have you seen Cass’ recent statements to the Kite Trust?
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/dr-cass-backpedals-from-review-hrt
She is recanting her fraud.
It’s because ideas and moral positions are signs of social status in the way that taste used to be, and expensive goods still are. These ideas are attractive because they are associated with high status. People don’t want to be seen with low status ideas any more than they want to be seen with a cheap handbag.
It’s also why people resist reason and evidence. It’s just perceived as a dig at the genuineness of their symbols of status – like pointing out that their expensive handbag isn’t actually very good quality.
Interesting idea. I’m sure you’re right.
That and no matter what form of thought may be in fashion, the middle class always has been, currently is, and always will be determined to dictate to the rest of us.
Perhaps we need to continually try engagement of dialogue, to those we care about and are with. Maybe because we see the problem as so big and so widespread that one on one is thought of as futile. I know I do. It can create a kind of apathy if your not careful – the opposite of the extremism we see from the ‘woke’ left extremists. One of my daughters was originally taken with these ideas more so than my other daughter. Through rather ‘rigorous’ conversation several times over, a shift stated to happen. I have personal reasons for being so ‘lets say over enthusiastic’ about this. However, it has changed our relationship for the better. Its actually opened up space. For her as well. Everything runs both ways.
The ‘problem’ is much broader than that, as Mary’s Austen quote shows. You don’t need Unis to produce middle class groupthink, it’s endemic to liberal societies and the way they counterpose agency ( the right to choose) and social position (stakes). As much as social situations vary, there’ll be differences in tastes, calling some ‘rigid dogmas’ is just another snobbery, bound up in the same game one purports to criticise.
There are patterns to political taste formation though. As French sociologists and geographapers have long pointed out, the more that people’s life chances are formed by public and commercial Institutions , the more they can see themselves as ‘free’ individuals. To the extent their supports are ignored they can wrongly imagine that society is fundamentally an aggregate of individuals (the Thatcher a d Trans delusion). Whereas those whose chances rely on the more visible supports of family and community generalise those conditions in their notions of ‘self evident truths’ about freedom and responsibility.
While there are bound to be differences of perspective between those thus differently situated, neither can claim to offer an adequate basis for knowledge, let alone governance. Enabling both groups to move beyond projecting their ‘certainties’ , rather than merely asserting one over the other,is the key to achieving viable political hegemony. Viable because it’s sustainable, unlike that which has prevailed in Britain for the last fifteen years.
.
Hugh Bryant is right in saying that groupthink is (nowadays) transmitted in the universities – but how did this come about? IMHO the fundamental problem is managerialism: the universities are now controlled by a managerial class who encourage half-educated students to undermine those academics who promote critical thinking – and this has spread throughout the western world, nearly destroying the legacy of the enlightenment. Any academic who wants to keep his/her job must be extremely careful not to fall foul of this unspoken conspiracy.
Most universities aren’t universities – they are expensive FE colleges.
“Full sheepskin, half education” has become the norm.
M Muggeridge was the The Guardian reporter in the USSR in the early 1930s. When he reported the famine he was sacked. G B Shaw visited the USSR and said he had never eaten so well.
That’s because the universities are for the most part the Colleges of FE of the 70s or 80s
Jesus Christ! It’s a bloody longwinded way of defining “received wisdom”
An excellent piece of Austen criticism too.
I have no doubt Harrington will be conspicuously silent about Cass’ current statements.
“vacuous grandes dames such as Allsopp”
And yet, the vacuous seem to control the narrative, regardless of how vacuous they are.
“Progressive” women in politics and the media live and breathe in-group consensus and disavow absolute truth.
Worse still, some of these women you describe actually know the absolute truth and cognitive dissonance makes their lives a misery.
Even on location location location, she had honed to a fine art her ability to patronise the little people. And she was a dab hand at home-made Christmas decorations. She should stick to that.
The usual anti-trans hatred that we have come to expect multiple times a day from Unherd. These ceaseless attacks on the most vulnerable members of society are sickening.
And the teenage writing style is utterly turgid. ChatGPT would be better.
The usual handful of informal fallacies and the stroppy “It’s not fair” teenage writing style we have come to expect from the intellectually challenged “Champagne Socialist”.
If Champagne Socialist is a troll, as many suspect, they are not very good at it unless their aim is to get as many downvotes as possible with the fewest words.
It’s long been speculated that it’s the musings of a member of the Unherd team, intended as clickbait.
My money is on Giles Fraser.
It’s all a matter of perspective. If this discussion were occurring on the Guardian website, CS would be getting the upvotes, and you would be getting the downvotes (I know, because I comment on both).
I think you are misinterpreting MH and certainly underestimating her. See my comment. Her piece is about the social mechanisms around “truth” and “truth” change far more than it is about the trans issue specifically. The latter is just the most pertinent and recent example.
That’s all way over CS’s head, I’m afraid.
the most vulnerable members of society
You really think these fat men with blue hair are ‘ the most vulnerable members of society’? Children are the most vulnerable members of society. You shouldn’t endorse their abuse.
BTW: Why does everything you write read like you copied and pasted it from somewhere else?
Children are the most vulnerable members of society. You shouldn’t endorse their abuse.
Maybe you should take that up with the Catholic Church.
Overly simplified for her audience but wrapped in a veneer of Groupthink – just a different Groupthink to that she rages against.
Cass report exists because there wasn’t a consensus. It didn’t just emerge out of the ether. Conflating the gender debate with the dilemmas faced during early Pandemic a neat bit of red meat for her fan-club.
Where Author just plays to virtual signalling gallery on the Right is her faux concern for the impact on children. Where’s her article about the increase in childhood poverty, the crisis in school funding, teacher shortages or even, given the focus on a clinical service, the atrocious position of CAMHs services nationwide which partly contributed to GiDs awful overreach? Nought is there, and because that would require a different consideration of the public realm.
Of course she and others are correct that GiDs made some terrible mistakes and recognition by those who supported is needed. As is accountability from the decision makers. Let us hope she’s as demanding on a whole range of other public policy failures.
Mary Harrington pushes all your buttons JW, just as many fallacies in your reply as “Champagne Socialist”
Point one out AR and I’ll then respond back.
By introducing a strawman and an ad hominem, which you appear to do on every one of Mary’s articles.
“Let us hope she’s as demanding on a whole range of other public policy failures”. Mary has, a good example being mass immigration. A (repeated) public policy failure that you fail to acknowledge in any meaningful way.
Mass immigration, whatever that means, isn’t a Policy. The Govt has made explicit decisions on Visa’s for specific industries, for those fleeing Ukraine, Hong Kong etc, but also failed to do much about overstaying Visa’s because hasn’t pushed forward on ID cards or enforcement. Your consistent problem is you rage about it but offer nothing on what you’d then do instead. Mary not dissimilar. I think legal, as well obviously as illegal, too high. ID cards and proper investment in key sectors to wean off overseas labour key, but it’ll take time and the Right has wasted 14yrs with slogans and dishonesty. Having supporters who believe simpleton solutions doesn’t help them of course.
As regards the issue of child mental health and GiDs, noticeable you ducked away from pointing out a fallacy for me to comment on. Come on give me something so we can debate the actual points in the Article.
Phew, took you long enough… were you hoping I’d forgotten 😉
You wanted an example of Mary’s criticism of other public policy (that’s your red herring/strawman) and I gave you one, it’s just not one that you wanted to hear. It is public policy introduced by the Blair and Brown governments and has probably been the most damaging public policy in the last 30 years. It’s one that you regularly deflect from (as your comment above, with the usual cliches).
You obviously don’t like Mary’s articles but offer other next to nothing as a thoughtful argument against any of them (begging the question), you can’t even mention her name but are quite happy to insult her and her readers (that’s your ad hominem). Better sort out that rage of yours JW, it’s blinding you to your bias :-).
Mary did not conflate the TUA trans issue with Covid measures, she used both as examples of a “Truth Universally Acknowledged”. You were putting words in her mouth
I was responding to these specific (false) issues in your comment.
We can’t debate JW because you are not very good at it. Sophistry is not debate; projection, dissembling, fallacies, bait & switch and obfuscation are the techniques sophists use.
Do better
Apols for delay HB. Was at work.
Back on the everything is down to Blair mantra I see, forgetting yet again that’s 16 years ago.
As regards the Authors TUA – that’s just a hook to make likes of yourself grasp at the confirmatory bias and conspiracy twaddle affirmation. She has to make a living though so I can see why she will play to gallery.
Of course if such a thing as TUA existed then the Cass Report wouldn’t exist either. It’s the fundamental problem with her contention.
Sophistry is all you have JW and you’re not very good at that either.
Point to Andrew, in regards to strawman assertion.
JW swung and missed the return, choosing not to address the strawman, instead just characterizing the TUA as a “hook to make the likes of yourself grasp at confirmatory bias…”, which is close to an ad hominem and definitely a redirection away from the strawman question by substituting a new derogation.
Except CS’s tend to disappear. It’s a pity in one way as it’d be a good memento of the crazy things people used to say.
Mary wrote an article on Abigail Schrier’s Bad therapy book. That covers mental health in children. Which pretty much sums up that to build resilience there should be less focus on mental health because the crisis we’re facing is of our own making through unnecessary preventative mental health care, starting in schools. This also links to a lack of teachers, after helping to create these little narcissistic monsters, schools no longer wish to deal with them.
I actually bought and agree with c90% of Schrier book. However worth remembering it’s much more US centric where ‘therapy’ more part of the culture. Still some that is transferable though.
The issue is how you then turn some of the trend around, unless it’s just about a feelgood Groupthink rant. Good CAMHs can also tell parents, and the child, there is nothing fundamentally wrong and prevent an over-medicalised approach. It can also stop parents heading down fee paying quackery. And as regards the GiDs issue these are complex cases where a broader assessment was essential yet absent and unobtainable.
Your last comment though shows some prejudice – it’s ‘all the fault of the child’ end of the spectrum. Other than denying access to some services what do you and the Author suggest? Now if the Author much stronger on Jonathan Haidht’s policy suggestions I’d have more time for her contentions here. But she’s full of critique and little construction.
At no point have I said it’s all the fault of the child. However, regardless of how the child has been raised and educated, they can’t go through life using the argument “it’s not my fault, it’s how I was raised and educated”. It stops being an excuse once you’re old enough to start taking responsibility for yourself. You find that many of these young people are self aware and happy to make bank on their inability to take responsibility and as long as bleeding hearts adults are willing to keep accepting responsibility on their behalf, they will continue to do so. The road to H3ll is paved with good intentions.
I agree we all have ‘agency’ LS, esp when adults. At what age do you deem someone now old enough? Is a 12yr able to have the insight that owning a smart phone and being on social media alot may have consequences for their health and well being? Or is that a parental decision? Just one example.
Yes, there is a fascinating battle in the air over agency versus social conditioning. The truth is a complex mixture – we are certainly in part programmed by our social context, but if one denies agency in order to avoid responsibility, there’s no pathway out.
This mirrors the conflict wherein some philosophers believe that there is no free will and everything is deterministic – and at the same time that we must act as if there were free will or bad things will happen.
In the political sphere, it seems to me that most of the “everybody is just a product of their environment” side’s motivation is not to find the most effective path towards a better world, but to avoid “blaming the victim”. That is, it’s most fundamentally about placing blame in ways that don’t feel uncompassionate, not about seeking real world functionality.
To the degree that this “blame society, not people” approach does try to improve the world versus make oneself feel more compassionate, they often gravitate towards totalitarianism – they must control every detail of social conditioning so as to produce the good kind of automaton rather than the bad kind – both having no real agency, but the former having the prescribed progressive beliefs and reflexes.
Totally agree – whilst this is typically a Harrington essay, it could only be received so positively on this site or Conservative Woman.
So argue against it than say “I don’t like it”.
I did, my comment has been suppressed yet again.
Fair enough
This is pretty extreme whataboutery even by your standards jw. Be graceful and admit you’ve been wrong about this issue as about so much else.
Perhaps a bit unfair to Mary, she can only write on so many topics, but bang on in pointing out that in addition to the various TUAs there are also TTNOCAs of equal or even greater importance which get no attention. That is Truths That No One Cares About!
“Cass report exists because there wasn’t a consensus. It didn’t just emerge out of the ether.” <– There is a consensus, the UK Establishment and Cass Report in particular are far out of step with it. That consensus exists for reason — because the measured physical, biological facts support solely that consensus.
Apparently, Cass herself is out of step with her own report.
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/dr-cass-backpedals-from-review-hrt
The consensus is that 1) gender is biological and formed in the womb, and it is unchangeable after birth 2) that sometimes and as often as 1 time in 150, a person is born with their sex having developed incongruently to their gender such that they perceive it, 3) that about 1 in 450 people will seek medical transition to change their apparent sex and gender 4) that such efforts will culminate in a transgender population — if supported in such an effort in their youth — has no notable unhappiness about doing so and is as likely to be mentally fit as anyone is, 5) the false positive rate for gender dysphoria with consequent medical transition is under 1% if the current standard of care, which are gender affirming, are followed.
The UK having socialist medicine where frankly patients are a cost and politicians are the customer, underfunded GiDs drastically. There should have been no 5 years waits and there should have been a lot more of gender affirming care.
Very interesting and insightful.
TUA is a handy idea and it’s existence stems from the failure of education, especially higher education. Higher education is about showing people how much they do not know. I like to say, for example, that I don’t know much more about mathematics than most people don’t know.
The opposite seems to be the case. When people can accept as a TUA that men can become women and vice versa and, worse, to attack those who fail to acknowledge this, I believe this reflects the arrogance of those with letters after their names but no learning.
It helps – or doesn’t help, depending on your position in the argument – that a lot of higher education degrees these days are explicitly intended to produce people both unwilling and unable to think rationally, and instead to become adept in ersatz rationalising and dishonest debate, with the intention that they are good at winning arguments politically. Politics itself of course has always rewarded people with such skills, what’s new is that academia is deliberately serving politics instead of being institutionally distinct.
Austen-tacious evisceration at its finest.
Experts and media-blobbies: you’ve been Harringtoned.
Excellent. One of Britain’s new breed of writers and analysts cutting clear paths through forests of bullshit.
……..and the Scottish government ‘doubles’ down, because, for the Scottish government, it’s ‘all’ about virtue signalling (Oh ! And looking better/superior than the ‘hated’ English).
It’s also deflection, I think. After so many years of SNP rule, Scotland is in a catastrophic state socially. Education, crime, healthcare – nothing much works.
Gosh ! ‘Unheard’ is really living up to its name. Someone on the editorial team is up bright and early, with their censors black pen. Or, maybe they just don’t like to hear criticism of Scotland’s ‘caring, sharing, virtuous, better than England’ government ?
I enjoyed this dissection of the defects of some of society’s leaders.
It is, however, only half the story. The problem is as much about those who follow blindly or acquiesce indifferently to the nonsense presented as the those who first pronounce the nonsense.
I spent most of the 2003-15 period away from British society and was startled by the change. Instead of a delight in argument my old friends seemed to have become conformists desperate not to say anything controversial. I felt like Rip van Rinkle only waking up in East Germany in 1970 not New England in 1790. Like frogs being boiled slowly they seemed not to have noticed the change.
Jonathan Haidt has emphasised the impact of social media since 2009 and there is obviously something in that but I think there are other factors also at work.
It seems that today debate on many issues is confined mostly to the retired, the self employed and the economically marginalised. The middle class, if in employment, appears to be a largely debate free zone. This may be in part the natural consequence of increasing job insecurity which encourages the extreme caution which can be exploited by entrepreneurial ideologues such as the Stonewall leadership and their American backers. It is noticeable that the BBC became monolithically progressive only after its employees were put on short term contracts.
Another factor is that schools increasingly teach rote conformity to safe answers to exam questions rather than how to think effectively. Universities cannot be surprised if their new students persist in seeking new orthodoxies that they can safely embrace.
No doubt there are also other factors explaining the craven conformity of so many.
If our system breeds slaves then it is inevitable that nonsense will be left unchallenged.
Fortunately, I see signs of a reaction. I think many want to see a revival in debate and in the critical examination of ideas and policies. Twitter is being replaced by Podcasts, polling suggests that teenagers – especially boys – are rebelling and even journalists are relearning the lesson that they can build careers by attacking instead of supporting the excesses of the consensus. Add a bit of job security and we might see “a hundred flowers bloom”. Who knows? Maybe we on UnHerd with our enthusiasm for amiable debate – and not as previously believed the more censorious and deluded progressives – are the avant garde.
It seems to be to do with the dominance of HR and the feminist agenda+legislation that empowers it. Been there, suffered under that. There are certain things at work that if you say (let alone debate!), you will upset some women, and they are precious things who must be kept on board at all costs. If that means firing anyone who says things that are true then, well, better that than hurting the diversity numbers you so badly need to stay on the right side of the “equalities” regulators.
Basic issue is that debate doesn’t seem to be something most women enjoy much, they find it intimidating, whereas men will often go at it like crazy and then still be friends afterwards.
Yes – debate didn’t just become dangerous with the trans issue.
I find that an extremely sexist view. I have always enjoyed debate and know plenty of other women who do, as well as plenty of men who will avoid it.
Yes it’s a sexist view. You might be surprised by how sexist young men are becoming over time. We’ve had very different experiences from you, or possibly are using the word debate differently.
After all the trans censorship issue is being driven primarily by women attacking each other isn’t it. How often do you read anything about the women who become men and the threats they pose to male spaces and rights? Never, right? And would you characterise anything that happened so far as “debate” because I wouldn’t.
I think it is probably more to do with the dominance of HR than feminism. There are similarities with McCarthyism which led to 100,000s losing their jobs in a similarly intimidating atmosphere and with similar charges of e.g. guilt by association or having the temerity to oppose the process. In the 1950s HR departments were run by men. I am not sure if HR attracts certain types or working in HR shapes people but there seems to be some association.
(This replaces an earlier comment to the same effect that has been censored for some reason).
I very much like your thinking Alex!
Those in universities like Blair in the late 1960s to 1970s came to power in 1997 and with them came Cultural Marxism which J Callaghan would have scorned. By 1992 all those who had fought in WW2 hd retired and by 1997 , none had done National Service.The reality of the labour party of 1997 was that it was run by people who had only known comfort and security so were unaware where their absurd ideas could lead.
Good point.
Personally, I tend to go with the “Yes, Prime Minister” position.
Hacker: “The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; the Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; the Times is read by people who actually do run the country etc”
Then in 1997 Blair got in and Guardian readers really did get to run the country. Since when the country has been, unsurprisingly, an utter disaster.
Yes. And while the public is briefly up in arms can we turn some of this forensic attention to other similar issues such as adhd and the medicalisation of children’s behaviour? The trans issue is a bit of a johnny-come-lately: all the good arguments against the horrors of prescribing pills to restless children were made and won 20+ years ago but the prescriptions continue to rise.
A pill for every ill.
It’s a spell, and it works best on those that don’t believe in spells.
Hilary Cass has done an important job, but you should not need an expert to spend 4 years gathering evidence and writing a report to know that giving children puberty blockers is a terrible thing to do, and should only be considered in the most desperate of circumstances.
Correct, this was known and written about by Isidora Sanger and others years before the Cass Report.
Except in Australia, where our federal Health Minister has declared that the Cass findings do not apply, because Australian gender clinics are already doing the right thing!
And the fact is Cass has herself already repudiated what her report is claimed to be by the gender critical — because gender affirming is the right thing to do.
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/dr-cass-backpedals-from-review-hrt
Great essay – with relevance beyond the Trans fiasco.
Indeed, its main point is that it goes beyond the trans issue and invites us to think about how “truth” comes to be acknowledged and why.
TUA is a tactic favoured by Remoaners. Anyone outside of their orbit is seen as easily manipulated (i.e. stupid), racist, xenophobic, etc, etc. The monstrous beauracratic juggernaut that is the EU unravels week by week. When it finally faces the truth – that it is unworkable – the TUA brigade will, like Allsop, Hunt and Rutherford, claim they always saw the problems.
What’s most staggering is that even now, eight years after the referendum, I’ve still yet to encounter a remainer with even a superficial knowledge of the EU, its institutions and workings.
If the leavers had campaigned on ‘it will cost us, but we will be FREE!’ it would have been a lot harder to attack them like this. Campaigning on ‘I like my cake and I also like eating it’ does expose those who vote for you to the charge of being easy to manipulate.
I guess it is a question of where the power and money lies. Unfortunately, ‘science’ has a tendency to produce the required results as it is dependent on funding. In my first proper job in computing, I was asked to code a test which was supposed to provide evidence that a particular type of screen fo some equipment would be better. I did not design the test. There were two types of screen being considered, a cheaper and more expensive screen. The test was essentially a simple computer game. This was in the very early days of computing. The cheaper screen was clearer and the more expensive screen had been treated to avoid eye strain. The test being a minute or two long favoured the cheaper screen. When I pointed this out, I was ignored.
I suspect, underlying the trans scandal is a great deal of sexual perversion. Jeffrey Epstein traded on sexual perversion. Debbie Heaton freely acknowledges he has autogynephilia. What I don’t understand is why he (and the moral majority) believe he should be supported in living out his sexual fantasies in the classroom. It seems he (amongst others) believes it is more important he is constantly sexually aroused than the traditional mores of society are respected. That it is really all about sexual arousal has been made clear by the ludicrous size of the breasts of Kayla Lemieux (another teacher) in Canada and the trans lawyer Stephanie Mueller in the United States.
I was oblivious to the capture of Stonewall by transhuman (to call them what they really are) activists until I met a young man in Brighton in 2022. He’d got a job with Stonewall at the beginning of 2020 and was excited to start working when the lockdowns were imposed. Everything was done on screen. Several times he tried to make the point that young gay men are often targeted by these maniacs calling themselves “trans activists” and bullied into taking hormones and being castrated and calling themselves “women” when they are really gay men. This poor soul was bullied into silence and – on a number of occasions – literally “muted” by people controlling the zoom call. I was horrified. And then started to meet other people – parents whose children were irreversibly damaged by surgery, lesbians who’d been raped by a “woman”. And I realised the true scale of the horror. But I was also afraid of speaking out. When “Glamour” magazine proudly put a “pregnant man” on their front cover, I broke my silence and publicly condemned the act. The person they held up in a macabre circus freak show like manner was actually a woman with severe autism. She’s obviously been coaxed into a “sex change” before getting pregnant, and Glamour were bragging about this. Disgusting! The people who perpetrated this and have children puberty blockers need to be prosecuted and jailed for a long time for their crimes.
Well aren’t you an especially confabulationist imbecile?
Cass has already stabbed you in the front for the sake of salvaging her reputation from her fraud.
The fact is, medical transition is regretted <1% of the time, and by gender -affirming protocol no one is “coaxed” into it.
Is that you again, Titania?
The one who does not lie, liar? Yes.
I guess, essentially, it is just another case of the emperor’s new clothes. In the words of the great TS Elliot: the world turns and is forever still.
So then, the real Truth can be found amongst the TUR’s, the truths universally rejected.
If only it were that simple 🙂
The great thing about true wit is that you can riff on it endlessly without it ever dating. Azar Nafisi from “Reading Lolita in Tehran”- “Its a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man regardless of his fortune must in in want of a 9 year old virgin wife”.
As always, MH is excellent. What also interests me is, why Cass has triggered the flip. What I mean is, equally weighty voices have been saying exactly the same thing for years, to no effect. I can easily imagine a counterfactual where Cass gets rubbished, but some other event further into the future then triggers the sentiment flip. This all is literally about herd behaviour and mass sentiment, with a few holdouts (who, to be clear, can be equally deluded, like the Japanese soilder in the jungle). I am interested in what causes the ‘wave collapse’ that marks the making or breaking of mass consensus. Anyone who has observed the markets for any length of time will know that group sentiment can drive the ‘valuation’ of an asset to reality-bending levels (e.g. Tulips) and then the consensus breaks, sometimes all of a sudden and all hell breaks loose and people get hurt, or sometimes more of a wimper over a period of time, e.g. the dotnet bubble didn’t go pop with a big bang, but instead deflated like a puncture over a couple of years or so, but the net effect is the same and people get hurt, e.g. Nasdaq went down nearly 80% between March 2000 and October 2002. It seems we collectively place the same types of ‘valuation’ on pieces of societal governance, e.g. social mores and downstream of that laws and so on, and these ‘valuations’ swing around equally violently as say stock markets. Who is adroit enough to jump on, and then off the bandwagon at the right times, and who gets caught and becomes a victim is also interesting. The difference now is though, the internet remembers everything – so rewriting history in the same way as was possible in the past is no longer viable – someone somewhere will point out what you said in the past and keep needling away at that until your credibility breaks – a phenomena the Tories are observably currently victims of.
As with the transgenderism stuff, I honestly think it is just a matter of time before the consensus on the green stuff breaks, because it is patently clear that the entire model is plain unworkable unless you simultaneously flip to nuclear etc (which itself is by no means cost free but is, just about, economically feasible) and I don’t see that the entire world will voluntarily drive itself into penury.
This is an interesting point, it is almost as though certain TUAs get so puffed up by their supporters that they are like balloons that are overblown, some burst with a bang, some deflate slowly and others get pushed out of prominence to deflate slowly but surely in a corner, an embarrassment that tries to pretend it didn’t exist. The why is not clear though. Electric vehicles seem to be the next one on the horizon with early enthusiasts now going quiet as the logic of the vehicles is shown to not really exist. Heat pumps will be the next one, they will work fine for a small part of the market for quite some time, possibly many years, but the logic of them will mean the push to convert all of us to them will slowly fade.
I think this is because some people are looking for a chance to walk away from an issue, but daren’t do it alone. In this case Cass provided the chance to walk away from the trans side without stigma.
My thought too. There was a hidden uneasiness about trans “affirming care” but few were willing to stick their heads above the parapet. The appearance of the Cass report gave them cover and enabled them to declare that they were only waiting for such a comprehensive report to confirm their “long-held” suspicions.
I find it very hard to believe that the people who insisted that net zero policies would lead to prosperity can have genuinely believed it.
If they are ‘green’ activists such as Caroline Lucas or Patrick Harvie, such policies will definitely lead to prosperity – for them.
What also interests me is, why Cass has triggered the flip.
That’s a very good question PK.
Yes – I assume Cass contains no new evidence, only new interpretation and analysis of what was already there.
I hope you’re right as regards your conclusion, but history teaches us that empires fall despite the best efforts of their peoples: none of us want to become poor, yet none of us can control the sweep of history.
I scrolled to find this comment and would have posted it if not found. I’m also curious about this. How many of the people suddenly reversing themselves have read the report? How many even have read the first page?? Based on prior experience with such people I doubt they did so.
My guess is that they’re responding to the fact that:
1. Cass is a woman and unknown. Makes it harder to do ad hominem/identity politics. I bet it’d have been immediately attacked or ignored if it was written by a man.
2. It’s a Government Report™ so has the stamp of establishment formality.
3. It took years to make and is very long.
So to come out swinging against Cass in public would require you to read the whole document and develop your own opinions on it, and that’s a massive chore for something most of them never cared about in the first place (not really). Easier to just look around and see what other people are saying then pretend you’ve always agreed with that.
I’ve read quite a few “opinions” about the report from laypeople who know little about the medical aspects of the report. I’ve read parts of the report, but I am not a pediatrician, so it’s hard to question or reject some of her observations. I’m gender-critical and have always been against the transitioning of children, and I’m thrilled that, finally, the insanity will end, and hopefully people will realize that they are not doctors before they trash Dr, Cass.
That’s a good list. I’d also suggest that people have been thinking about this issue within their own heads and coming to conclusions that broadly align with those in the report, but until now have not wanted to voice those conclusions. So whilst publicly they appeared to suddenly reverse, in terms of their beliefs they had already moved innthat direction but it was only when the report was published that they were able to announce it.
Maybe, but surely we’d have seen a lessening of passion before the flip in that case. For the head of Stonewall it must be something else surely. There are other things she could have focused on instead.
I think it may be as straightforward as this: the MSM and its acolytes can’t start to pick and choose which government-commissioned Inquiry it takes on board. If it decided to gainsay the Cass Report, it places itself in no position to promote the findings of other Reports it agrees with – such as that of the forthcoming Covid Inquiry.
There’s also the “follow the science” principle – one which the Cass Report goes to town with highlighting how transactivists within the medical and other professions have failed to do so.
It is an interesting question. However,
“As with the transgenderism stuff, I honestly think it is just a matter of time before the consensus on the green stuff breaks, because it is patently clear that the entire model is plain unworkable unless you simultaneously flip to nuclear etc (which itself is by no means cost free but is, just about, economically feasible) and I don’t see that the entire world will voluntarily drive itself into penury.”
If by green stuff you mean net zero you might be right. But if by green stuff you mean the actual science of climate change then I wouldn’t hold your breath.
What is the science of climate change? It’s a delicate house of cards. Real science would allow examination of every line of the climate change syllogism. Forbidding any attack or even doubt on every element of the hallowed theory shows you that it is dogma and not science.
Contrast the world of astrophysics where scientists are quite willing to discuss wild variations of core theories without exploding in rage.
My argument is that those holding to a chattering-class moral consensus are living vicariously because how well you signal your virtue is (currently) far more important socially than mere reality.
They march across the map towards a symbol they take to be a Truth Universally Acknowledged only to find that it is smudge or fold and does not correspond to the terrain… But the march must go on! So a new Truth Universally Acknowledged is identified and the consensus swerves towards it. No-one on the march looks back to learn map reading lessons.
I think half the problem lies in that they were too busy signalling their virtue to realise and understand what they were in fact saying. Many chanting the mantra that trans women are women, were wholly ignorant to what was happening at GIDS and believed that children were merely pretending to be the opposite sex, and what’s the harm in a little make believe. Faced with the facts of life altering drugs and a lifetime on medication and sterilising surgeries, they wish to do an about turn and save face. Sadly, ignorance is not an excuse.
It seems to me that reason and objectivity are rather like Christianity. In both cases, the discipline is harder than people usually acknowledge. In both cases, many of those who profess adherence are hypocritical and self-deluding. But in both cases, if we give up on them altogether then we need to think very carefully about what takes their place.
I have no wish to pay for the incarceration of these people. Prehaps instead their assets could be seized and the proceeds used to build a series of fine stone crosses in the major cities. They could then be forced to parade in a penitential manner from cross to cross on their knees, stripped to the waist and self flagellating. The very public humilation and expiation would provide a degree of public satisfaction that a great wrong had been acknowledged and paid for.
Good overall article – as always from MH.
But on the specific point of COVID, she glosses over the fact that the anti-lockdown brigade *also* based their approach on a TUA consensus (as she calls it). They just belonged to a different bubble. And they are still (here, on Unherd) promoting their own bubble view.
The problem is what you should do when there are nowhere near enough scientific data and thinking to make a proper evidence-based decision – but you cannot afford the luxury to postpone the decision for 5-10 years and hope for more clarity. In the case of individual medical treatment it is well established that it is better to do nothing than to barge ahead with treatments that might not work (except possibly in a research setting, or with someone who is known to be dying anyway). So for sex transitions the obvious decision is to wait till you are sure – even if it does mean that it will be too late for individual children to avoid an unwanted puberty.
For COVID all effective options required large-scale buy-in – as an individual you cannot effectively make a difference in a society-wide epidemic. And it is not obvious that it is better to let the epidemic run, at the cost of an unknown number of deaths, than it is to ‘move fast, move hard’ to squash it, at the cost of long-term social effects that there is no need to list here.
As they say of junior officers: when in a horrible mess it is crucial that they make a quick decision and give clear orders. It is of course better if they make the right decision, but that is more than you can realistically demand.
Absolutely nailed it here. Not sure why people would downvote this.
Because there’s no such thing as a “sex transition” Wake up please.
Gender transition would have been a better choice of words, seems like nitpicking however.
You have a fair argument for the initial reaction to Covid, but not for keeping lockdown going as long as they did and not for repeatedly making the same mistake. The fact that scientists deliberately lied about lab leak does not inspire confidence that even the early decision making was being driven by scientists who did not know better but were recommending what they honestly thought was the truth.
And it is not obvious that it is better to let the epidemic run, at the cost of an unknown number of deaths
False equivalence. There was no suggestion that the epidemic be ‘left to run’. The argument was whether to focus all measures on those seriously at risk or to lock down the whole society. The wrong decision was made at least partly because of the phenomenon that MH describes.
Whose argument? Quite a lot of people claimed that with sufficient Zinc, vitamin D and a healthy lifestyle this ‘new kind of flu’ did not require any special measures. Then there were the Barringtoners, who did argue for isolating the most vulnerable. Unfortunately it seems completely obvious that there is no way you can keep the virus away from such huge groups of people for any significant length of time. We cannot prove it, because it was never tried, so the Barringtoners can keep saying ‘if only they had done as I suggested’ with no fear of being proved wrong.
The decision was made in part because of the phenomenon that MH described – but the decision to oppose it was made (in part) for exactly the same reason. At some point we will reach a consensus on what would have happened with different policies, but we sure do not know now. For all we do know, leaving the Barringtoners in charge would have led to a lot more deaths. If you think you do know, you are free to prove it.
We cannot prove it, because it was never tried,
Sweden.
Denmark.
That’s not a problem. It has an answer that is simple, universal and correct: “you” (the government) should do nothing.
If there’s no evidence on which to base a decision, then doing things anyway is the politicians fallacy: something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done. The problem is that literally any imaginable action can be justified this way. Even if one of them turns out later on to have been a good choice, if you’re making a decision based on nothing then the outcome is going to be nearly random (or more likely, biased towards things that reinforce social status), and thus nearly always going to be incorrect. It leads to Lisa’s tiger-repelling rock.
When we’re talking about the government (vs individuals) this is compounded by two more problems: governments tend to force people to do their random thing, and also ban any alternatives, so exploration of the decision space stops. This is a great way to ensure that no real science gets done (as it requires the ability to do experiments and compare outcomes).
This is all independent of COVID. It’s true of many other situations. In the absence of extremely strong and widely accepted evidence, the correct thing for governments to do is always nothing.
I strongly disagree with that. Decision making under uncertainty is a standard problem. Military officers do it, businessmen do it, politicians do it, individuals do it. Because they *have* to. There is always risk. If you wait till you know for certain, others with higher risk tolerance will have got the business, or conquered the city, or the chance of solving the problem will have evaporated.
The point is that it is not a question of knowing either nothing or everything. Even in science you get your answers as probability values. For the most reliable science the probabilities can get quite extreme, but often you are less well off. And in real life things can get quite uncertain. That is when you need to be able to decide what to do about a modest chance of a very bad outcome. And most people do do something about it – they buy insurance. They do not wait to see whether their house is really going to burn.
As it happens, my take from the COVID debate is that scientists are not that good at taking important decisions under high uncertainty. Scientists are trained to like certainty, to seek certainty, and to trust their models until they are proved wrong. Tegnell and some of of his colleagues IMHO showed an inappropriate faith in their (flu-based) prior plans, and never really considered the ‘what if this is worse?’. Certainly the Danish Tegnells who told when the virus hit the headlines that ‘It will never be a big problem, and even if it is it will never make it to Europe, and even if it does it will not kill many’ did not impress by their foresight. With all the problems they have, there is a case for leaving this kind of decision to politicians. Their motives may be suspect, but at they are used to working under uncertainty.
Excellent article, to which I’ll add an observation I’ve made about how the last thirty years of western “consensus” politics really works. On the face of it, political pragmatists who ignore principles and simply do deals between opposing sides in any argument because that’s the best way forward, look like rational actors whose lack of interest in ideology seems to emphasise their impartiality, and consequently the degree of trust we might possess in their competence.
In actuality what really happens is that systematically operating on these principles has the perverse consequence that more extreme policies become possible, not less so – the exact opposite of what is apparently intended by consensus politics. The reason it happens is that activists find that because there is never any need to defend their ideas, all that matters is the amount of trouble they can cause because that’s what actually forms the basis of their power. So if you’re an activist, there’s no need to compromise or deal with sceptical analysis of your demands: the government will do that, all you have to do is screech and scream until you get what you say you want, and the more extreme your demands, the more you drag government policy to where you want it.
In other words, the Overton Window ends up positioned exclusively by warring extremists, with moderate voices becoming irrelevant to policymakers. This is how the lunatics end up in charge.
Denmark, because of its political system, is one of the most concensus-minded polities there is. How would you explain that the Danish ‘Overton window’ has moved decisively towards anti-immigration consensus policies?
Presumably because it has managed the feat of producing exactly the consensus politics originally intended?
What we have in the UK is not what exists in Denmark and not what was the intention of the so-called “third way” politicians of a generation ago. It’s an intellectual vacuum in which stupid ideas possess a survival advantage over ideas requiring actual effort to understand and implement.
Proportional systems can malfunction too, but what you say does seem to be a problem of two-party winner-take-all systems. It is too easy for an aggressive, extreme minority to take power over one of the parties (‘win with us or lose without us’), and then wait till sooner or later they get power. They can then force through policies that do not have a majority, because of their strategic position. The Tories and Hard Brexit, Trump and the stolen election, and Jeremy Corbyn spring to mind.
I find it rather amusing when it comes to the Covid debate, that the TUA crowd were breaking the very rules they had put in place. When confronted with this, they (obviously) couldn’t find an answer for it.
The next TUA that we need to crumble is the Climate Change Scam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovsgeBcX8Ao
Good article as usual, but I am getting more and more tired of seeing the word “centrist” applied to people who are well left of centre.
When do the prosecutions start? The doctors being struck off, the surgeons who made fortunes paying out till they live as tramps?
“the chattering-class two-step of moral groupthink masquerading as science”. Brilliant Mary
“Downstream of their posturing, children were irreversibly harmed. They didn’t care; they wanted to look kinder than you. They should not be allowed to forget how wrong they got it.” So true. Sums up the whole sh*t show. Fine writing, fine sentiment – MH on exquisite form once again.
Just when we thought that logic and evidence were irretrievably lost to a raging sea of viciously enforced nonsense, along come Mary Harrington and Kathleeen Stock.
It was not just predictable, it was predicted that the “Transphobe!” shriekers in high places would claim to have been on the side of the angels all along as soon as the public discourse weather vane changed direction.
Eisenhower’s mention in his Farewell Address of the military-industrial complex is well known but less well known is his warning, in the same speech, “Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite”.
He was clearly quite a man and this speech should be better known.
People are still in thrall to what they call “Climate Science”, however.
I’ve occasionally wondered what a systematic taxonomy of trans rights activists and “allies” would look like.
There would be true believers; bandwagon jumpers looking for social media validation; well-meaning people who genuinely think they are being kind; doubters who double down extra hard to silence their inner voice; misogynists who just want an opportunity to bash women’s rights; “omnicause” types who mostly care about being outraged about everything, not the specifics of the thing; and straightforward grifters.
But they will be all mixed up and some will be a combination of different categories.
Too big a job for me I’m afraid.
This is not a drive-by, it’s a drive-around tour de force in a quickie format. Cass Report, Jane Austen, Stonewall, covid, modes of thought differences b/w male and female, moral consensus and evidence based – all brought together succinctly, Great job.
The use of Jane Austen brings to mind Thomas Piketty’s use of Austen in his Capital book from almost 10 years ago. A moral consensus rises from the sociological reality of a time which derive from the underlying wealth and income structures. Mary Harrington nails this with her use of Kirstie Allsopp, who is, in fact, an elite keenly aware of the shifting sands and certainly more than capable of reading tea leaves and maintaining her relative status. She may even employ some “female arts” mechanisms and signals. She certainly looks reasonable enough in her photograph.
Going back to Piketty and his book…. Society is organized around income earners taking their profits and investing in wealth. Wealth is then maintained and grown at a rate greater than the growth in income. All the schlepps who only have income are left behind. Sociology is the study of how the owners of the wealth assets who only care about preserving and growing their “just rewards” wealth go about propping up social structures that promote and preserve an order. If that means sacrificing children and condoning sex alteration on our future procreators, so be it. It that means making a boat load of money from mRNA technology and damaging a generation and perhaps more, fine.
It is all terribly complex and opaque. But it’s also simple, in that the levels of wealth and income inequality present today in all developed nations is at a level only seen once before – 120 years ago at the peak of the Gilded Age. And what happened then? 30 years of war and depression and pestilence.
The Kovid Kerfuffle was a warning shot, as is the idiocy of “gender affirmation”. Will things improve if we root out the Kirstie Allsopps in their “safe spaces” and expose their quivering. No. They get their power from owning the assets.
For many of these elite women who, in Austen’s time, would be eyeing one another over their fans at Lady So and So’s, now work in New Elite industries, many of which are markedly female-dominated. Allsopp is a case in point: her parents are Lady and Baron Hindlip, and she is a Hon., though doesn’t usually use the title.
Eh? I really don’t think her parents’ titles are in any way relevant in this trans discussion. Also, as regards her Hon.title, in what circumstances could she use it in her line of business? “Hello, I am the Hon. Kirstie Allsop”?
Maybe on her cheque book, but they don’t exist much these days.
The point is that Allsopp is a member of the elite
I do find it quite surprising that the forces of anti-science have chosen to object to quarantine (aka lockdowns). If you want to prevent the spread of a contagious disease, then surely it’s obvious that keeping people apart will be helpful.
Yes, and surprising that making a completely reasonable and innocent point can get you more down ticks than up ticks!
We have always been at war with Eurasia.
What all the wise men promised has not happened, what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass. Lord Melbourne
Rather difficult to pick up the thread of the argument in this rambling piece. The nature of controversy in this time of social bubbles and virtue posturing – YES very relevant.. the danger of identity politics and associated activism clouding rational debate YES again – the pressures to conform with socially popular but evidentially weak stances aggressively promoted – YES as well. But male vs. female perspectives on evidence – ???? Jane Austin -??? Covid- stories-??? Sorry I’ve lost the plot.
Nope, she’s right. The whole trannie thing could only happen under a female zeitgeist where the appearance of conformity and niceness are valued above honesty.
Women generally incapable of rational analysis or taking science-based argument and position? What a sordid view you do have!
Women are certainly capable of rational analysis or scientific argument. But there is a decent argument to be made that women are socialised to a culture where preserving harmony is more important, and men are socialised to a culture where arguing and winning (and getting both the truth and the status) is more important than harmony. Following which a more female-dominated culture could be expected all other things being equal to be a bit less tolerant of disharmonious argument. See the books of Deborah Tannen if you are interested.
I can sort of see how Kirstie Allsopp flops about in the wind about ‘trans’. There is nothing at stake for her but the approbation of her peers and colleagues in medialand.
What really is galling however is the position of Adam “I don’t know much about it” Rutherford. He works in the Biosciences division of UCL. He’s a geneticist for goodness’ sake. Did he really not think to investigate this bonkers phenomenon of ‘transgenderism’ further? Did he really not think that humans claiming they can ‘change sex’ might be in need of some help for their mental health?
I have until recently been a subscriber and supporter of Humanists, as I always thought that their position when it came to different groups requesting or requiring special treatment was the sensible and fair proposition of levelling the playing field. They could have developed the #BeKind strapline all by themselves as they have championed kindness all along. What could be wrong with that? And Alice Roberts was my heroine.
So imagine my surprise and confusion when this bastion of scientific rigour, along with good ideas about fairness and respect for others – kindness ffs – came out on the side of the magical idea that human can change sex and that women should bow down and make way for men in womanface wearing stereotype ‘feminine’ clothing and surgically enhanced female breasts. And that these men should be welcomed into women’s spaces just because they said so (mostly with their male genitalia intact btw) and never mind if those women were made uncomfortable, or were disturbed or even fearful. The comfort of men was placed way above that of women, their brash arrogance buoyed by their insistence that they had ‘gender dysphoria’ (sounded nice & sciency) and that they didn’t ‘feel safe’ unless they were affirmed and validated by us. What mugs they must have thought we were. And yet. Many women went along with it. Because they had to Be Kind. Those of us who didn’t… well, we know what happened to them/us. The thing is maybe some of these individuals did have some kind of dysphoria or dysmorphia. But any real diagnoses of mental disturbance were avoided, set aside and overwhelmed by the fetishists who managed to slide their adherents and ideology onto the ‘diversity’ staff rotas of companies & organisations, into the ranks of decision makers in institutions like the NHS, onto Council boards and even onto the benches of the judiciary.
How so many people were unable to see through this, once ‘Drag Story Hour’ began infiltrating schools with their jolly and funny Pantomime Dames, and the number of children claiming ‘gender’ questioning suddenly ballooned, is beyond comprehension. And utterly extraordinary once we saw children being conveyored into chemical and surgical pathways long before they could possibly know the implications. The connections with some other pretty unsavoury paraphilias surely should have been a warning too?
So I am aghast at the carelessness and closing of ranks of organisations like Humanists. But maybe I ought to have realised that pink & blue hair wherever it is worn, and pink & blue flags wherever they are flown, were all in truth actually just massive red flags.
I think if you look at Humanists, what you find is a group that is more governed by what they are “against” (a moral climate influenced by monogamy, stable homes, and belief in God) than what they are “for”. The “Be Kind” part doesn’t really mean kindness in an altruistic sense, but it means tolerating things that really should be intolerable (like men in women’s locker rooms, for example).
Emphasis on Red.
“What really is galling however is the position of Adam “I don’t know much about it” Rutherford. He works in the Biosciences division of UCL. He’s a geneticist for goodness’ sake.” <– Then he knows of the overwhelming genetic evidence that people are born transgender, that gender is biological — not socially constructed. It is gendered behaviors which are socially constructed. He knows if one of a pair of identical twins separated at birth is transgender, the other has a 45 fold increase in likelihood they are also transgender.
An important and insightful discussion which invites a qualified response. More apposite than the author perhaps realises to open with that Austen quip, despite the gratuitous swipe at The Enlightenment; it’s the resort to ‘self-evident truths’ as a support for social and moral order which is the object of Austen’s satire and Harrington’s critique of Trans Megalomania. The diversion to Britain’s failure to protect from COVID is also question begging, because it was total panic and not a moral or enlightened one which pitched an abandoned population into compliance with belated and poorly aimed restrictions.
Beleaguering British COVID policies therefore don’t provide insights for examining the interplay between expert and enlightened opinion on gender transitions. The key Harrington seeks are the ‘truths universally acknowledged’ highlighted by Austen and the problem is how could those have swung round from nuanced re-interpretation of social context to the insistent proclamation of supreme right to individual choice irrespective of context or consequence. We still need to know how such problematic principles have insinuated themselves into enlightened and even expert predilections. Because the consequences extend far beyond the malpractice addressed in the Cass Report.
In other words this is another manifestation of the ‘self evidence’ asserted by libertarians, so preoccupied by how others might impinge on them that they can’t see how they’d ride roughshod over others. If they had half a chance.
I think the worst of this was how many “professional” associations just rolled over on this one. I have a friend who is a therapist who jumped on the “affirming” bandwagon and sent all of her gender confused adolescent clients onto the hormone and surgery route. When I confronted her with this horror she calmly stated that she wasn’t going to take advice from myself, who probably was brainwashed by right wing propoganda, but rather from the American Pediatric Association and the American Phychiatric Associations, ALL which endorsed “gender affirming care”. You can’t really stand up to that. “So you know more than the doctors associations?” “Um, yes, they aren’t following science.” “Sure Jen, sure.”
what does your friend say now?
She’s gone silent.
Because this never happened?
Your therapist friend just decided to tell you about how she is treating her adolescent clients? Do you realize how utterly stupid you sound?
Yes, she posted on social media the new guidelines and said we need to support this community. So she’s not telling me about individual clients but she was championing the new guidelines for gender affirming care and so I talk to her about it. That’s not stupid at all
Doesn’t sound stupid at all. I have a therapist friend who was boasting the same.
And you are not listening to them now as you never before in the first place.
Expect her to mention Cass’ refuting what you are celebrating then.
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/dr-cass-backpedals-from-review-hrt
You are a pro-child abuse idiot. The Cass Report is fraud, and Cass has already repudiated it.
Overall, though, no lessons will be learned.
Instead, what unfolded during this sorry episode and the Covid panic before it will be repeated again, probably by the same people who pushed the previous two scams and got away with it. And they’ll get away with it again.
Great essay.
Can I just add a note of caution in interpretation. I don’t think Mary is saying that the great and the good have just done a flip from TUA to Truth (now that they agree with “us”). She is saying that they have done a flip from TUA to TUA for reasons which are unrelated to truth, or at most obliquely related.
To paraphrase Rimbaud – truth is elsewhere. That is outside the great social game of TUA.
Mary Harrington’s essay is brilliantly incisive because it’s a carefully reasoned effort to get at the truth of the matter.
Some of the commenters — who seem to think they agree with her — would do well to follow her example and not stray to the end of the earth where it seems that there was “no crisis” during the COVID pandemic; that the disease was simply influenza by another name; and that the enormous loss of life is irrelevant because, after all, if people don’t die of one thing they’ll die of another. Harrington’s lament that no lessons were learned doesn’t mean we ought to have learned such a lesson as that.
Thank you for that. As a member of the Skagit Valley Chorale in Washington state, USA, we became a poster child for how to handle a massive Covid outbreak in our midst. Within a week of March 10, 2020, 53 of 64 chorale members at a rehearsal came down with Covid, proving without a doubt in our minds and the researchers who later studied our experience, that Covid was transmitted by aerosols, not so much “touch surfaces”. Within 2 weeks, 2 of our group had died, and many of us had our family lives and career paths abruptly redirected.
We then walked a path, starting with shutdown and isolation, guided mostly by our own instincts and reinfection rates within our membership, then onto rehearsals via Zoom, then to rehearsals in person but with masks, social distancing, and in chilly, open air facilities. We Covid tested ourselves frequently, isolated when indicated, used carbon dioxide monitors during rehearsals as a proxy for air contamination, and required vaccination in all members. We have since gradually “softened” our restrictions, and this summer break will again, 4 years later, consider what further of these safety measures we can modify, keep, or dispense with.
I won’t try to directly compare Covid management with transgender “affirmation” vs “gender straight” dogma, but simply to note that, with Covid in a closed group setting, as is our chorale, our closely watched personal experience certainly informs our approach to Covid along with considerable study of any scientific literature we can find.
I will say that highly respected transgender persons I know certainly have a wealth of personal data which started quite early in their lives and which should be given fair space in helping them, individually, make important personal, medical, and familial decisions. The age of self determination, however, certainly should be determined.
The devil is in the details. That is what makes these sweeping generalizations so difficult to make and then implement. A little humility never hurts, either.
I’m not sure that staking a claim to objectivity is universally acknowledged as masculine-coded.
>child gender vivisection
Brilliant phrase, will be using that one in future!
Its what you get when a society is ruled by cowardly, narcissistic, opportunistic people with no character let alone principals, and have no real identity of their own. These peoples lives revolve around public image and obsessed with pleasing their peers, and are terrified of losing approval of those said peers, which creates existential dred about their lives.
Mary Harrington in perfect pitch, thank you. TUA should become a watchword to identify groupthink.
“It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
– Mark Twain.
The brilliant truth.
Great article from Mary as usual, but none of this is remotely surprising to me, because to me this is as obvious as the sun rising in the morning. It’s rare that anyone not similarly socially disabled as myself actually begins to see the extent to which human beings are guided not by reason, logic, and science, but rather by each other, through the mechanism of establishing social norms and subtly coerced conformity. Most of this happens beneath the threshold of conscious awareness in normal people. In me, it doesn’t happen at all, which is why none of what Mary has written here with her usual skill comes as any particular surprise. It’s people being people as I’ve come to understand them. People influence each other’s perceptions, behaviors, and thinking in ways almost nobody realizes. I credit Mary for her observational skills in picking out a couple of issues like COVID and trans-activism as being nonsense and identifying human social behavior as the reason such nonsense can be sustained for any period of time.
Unfortunately, this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Basically all human collective knowledge, customs, culture, and worldview was established not through reason and logic or even government propaganda, but through the organic social processes that Mary has examined here. The establishing and enforcement of Truths Universally Acknowledged is in fact the normal way humans tease out what is true and false, normal and abnormal, and accepted or not accepted by society at whatever time. It’s a social process that has more to do with who is associating with whom in what social circles and what is being discussed over the water cooler in places of high influence and culture, such as corporate boardrooms, university lecture halls, and high levels of government. With her example from Pride and Prejudice, a tale of the social intricacies of upper class society, she hits quite near the mark. These are the places where common knowledge, common culture, and social norms are established. The process of desiring acceptance into a group and subtly altering one’s own perceptions and beliefs to conform to the group is always operating. I don’t believe normal people are capable of turning it off, even for scientists, philosophers, and intellectuals. Few are even aware it exists and many are wholly driven by it without acknowledging or even realizing it (Mary names a few of these). The themes and excuses change, but most of what humans regard as being true, accepted, and acceptable at any one point in time is equally subjective and arbitrary.
I can understand Mary’s frustration. I was frustrated too when I was first figuring all this out decades ago. Most people don’t react well to learning how little reason and logic there actually is in the formation of human knowledge, or to being told their cultural beliefs and values are just as temporal and arbitrary as those beliefs from all those civilizations that are now regarded as barbaric to the point of being detestable. This is what I call the conceit of the Enlightenment. Modern man, particularly modern western European man, likes to think this has changed, that now we have logic and reason to guide us, that now we’re better than those benighted savages who worshiped the sun. We want to believe that because we have science, reason, and objectivity, we’re better than that. In fact, the causality is reversed. The logic and reason and science are simply the justification for believing modern man is better. People are really good at creating reasons why their group is superior and better than other groups or those that came before. It’s one of the few constants one can trace throughout history. The reasons vary, and we can certainly debate the merits of one view or another, but we’re likely to favor what’s familiar, even myself. I may be mostly immune to social forces but I am limited by my environment and experiences, which are influenced by society, which is driven by social forces.
It’s not all bad though. The organic process of humans establishing collective ideas tends to reject nonsense eventually, but not immediately. Information can spread much quicker than it gets sorted as nonsense these days, and governments are almost inevitably composed of the most socially inclined people most devoted to their collective culture, thus more susceptible to flying immediately off the handle over some great new cultural or intellectual fad. It’s an unavoidable consequence of technology advancing faster than people’s ability to adapt to its effects, but people will adapt. They’ll learn to be skeptical and reserve judgement, because things like the COVID ‘consensus’ and trans-activism show us how quickly the nonsense can take hold. We’ll have to learn to exercise greater skepticism, even skepticism of the science and reason that are held sacred by modern man. I expect the list of notable foul-ups where ‘science’, ‘truth’, and ‘reason’ were obviously guided by social nonsense to grow until the lesson is learned, however temporarily until the wheel of society turns again. If there is such a thing as truth, it must be that which endures the long march of history. If there is such a thing as progress, it must occur through continuous, repeated failures and corrections.
It’s not a bad thing that some once thought that individual and collective decisions could be formed and informed by rational discourse. Doing that is another matter, only possible via appropriately organised endeavour.
The problem you reference is the assimilation of Reason as a support for this or that fashionable social dynamic, which can extend into professional associations linked with science and medicine. When such are meant on as authorities it’s a sure sign of deformation..
Excellent comment, and as i’ve often implored, we should be primarily seeking to better understand ourselves as human animals. Many social and cultural forces conspire to prevent us from doing precisely that.
Great read. Thanks.
Doubtless Allsopp and Rutherford will continue to get regularily invited to host msm tv & radio programmes
“This mode of knowing, central to the Enlightenment privileging of reason and objectivity, was (and still is) masculine-coded. It gains its power from asserting that its truths will remain true whether or not you acknowledge them as such.”
– ummm… maybe. Such a “mode of knowing” actually works very well for, say, physical constants, well characterised chemical reactions or the inevitable damage caused by sudden deceleration (jumping off a tall building will kill you whatever your opinions to the contrary). No need to gender that.
I suspect the real problem was the overreach by @r$e-numbingly imbecilic people in trying to treat society in the same terms as physical science. And it’s not just men doing that, either.
Those observations notwithstanding, great essay as always from Mary: good food for thought and discussion.
It’s the Death Of Science (to paraphrase that great philosopher, Dr. Lewis Schaffer).
Science can only properly deal with (i.e. make useful predictions for) fairly (sic) simple situations; as the number of independent variables increase the reliability of the predictions produced by any scientific theory fall asymptotically to zero.
Scientific method has been so successful in giving us all the amazing machines that enhance our material lives in every possible way that we want to apply it to impossibly complex problems (such as described above) where any “scientific” predictions are meaningless.
In such situations the best course of action is likely to be guided by observing historical precedents & changing things cautiously, a little at a time. There is, of course, no guarantee this is for the best – perhaps this time it really is different & we should do something drastic. There are no certainties in this great game of life, a game for which we did not write the rules, but in my experience the likelihood of things being rather similar to what they’ve been before is far greater than them suddenly & catastrophically changing.
So, prosaically, I shall follow that awful & awfully cliched philosophical path of Keep Calm & Carry On.
The set of people being (aptly) deconstructed here are sociopolitical descendants of the hothouse liberals and knowing cocktail-party chatterers of past generations.
However, there’s a crucial difference in their circumstances. The TUA messengers of the past could make themselves and their TUA generally known, but they lacked the means to communicate with each other instantly, constantly, through a vast network, or to use the same network as a lever for exerting direct pressure on society.
Now, that leverage makes it possible for a minority of people to fake a Truth Universally Acknowledged as never before and to make people in the majority fear that a failure to acknowledge it will bring direr consequences than being shunned.
The Family Property: The Archimedean Gamble
Absolutely brilliant article. Puts into words the frustration many of us feel about modern groupthink.
Excellent. Nails it down perfectly. The only thing missing is that everyone promoting a TUA actually knows it’s not true at all which is why they’re so vehement and nasty towards people who expose their stupidity simply by pointing out the stupidity of the TUA.
That was a delicious piece of MH vitriol and eloquence. Loved the Pride n Prej references.
I have a family member who debated with me how to vote on Brexit day as she wasn’t sure (I’m a leaver). Now she says she didn’t and she just voted remain.
Quick, get on the consensus wagon before you get found out!!
“while Boris Johnson accepts the moderate expert advice provided by Chris Witty to wash hands, protect the elderly but otherwise carry on with “business as usual”.
And in doing so he almost killed himself and doubtless hastened the life of a poor unfortunate who was deprived of a place in intensive care and the care of the two nursing staff who kept Johnson alive.
“How does a public consensus come into being? The Sensible Centrists like to imagine that this is a careful, deliberative process. Ideas are debated, among people of good faith, and assessed dispassionately, on their merits, in an ongoing collective striving for truth.”
This might be true but the question she fails to answer is how she arrives at the truth. No careful deliberative process needed? The trouble with her argument is that there is an underlying assumption that she and the likes of Matthew Goodwin know the truth whereas the poor benighted ‘experts’ are prey to the whims of the blob or ‘elites’. How is it she manages to escape into the realm of truth while everyone else is subject to prejudice and blind conformism? And there is a kind of contradiction in all this since the Cass report, which is pivotal to her argument, was presumably put together by establishment ‘experts’.
There is nothing wrong with disagreeing with experts and arguing they are misguided, but you do that by joining the debate not trying to by pass it. And I’m afraid quoting Jane Austen is not really very helpful here.
Like J Watson you don’t offer an actual argument, (only a circular one) just more sophistry.
I actually agree with her about the Trans issue. But that’s not central to her main point. The main thrust is about how elites and experts are merely sheep following the herd. But she can’t make that argument unless she makes it clear why she and others she agrees with somehow manage to avoid this herd following tendency. She, it might be argued, just follows a smaller herd – the UNherd herd so to speak! But this doesn’t necessarily take her closer to the truth. And she is OK with experts she happens to agree with – authors of the Cass report, for example.
No, it’s same “argument” with more words. Elites and experts aren’t following the herd, they are the shepherds. Detemining policy mostly through ideology rather objective truth, hence the use of “Truth Universally Acknowledged”, no debate is required, the accepted conclusion has been reached. This method is replacing democracy, it’s being handed over to unaccountable supranational bodies and NGOs.
child gender vivisection
Indeed
I absolutely agree with everything here and I find it all horrifying.
I’m reminded of what Jean-François Lyotard had to say about science in The Postmodern Condition. Although he’s always associated with dire University “po mo” he would have agreed with Harrington
What we call Science, he wrote, is fatally compromised by the sociopolitical landscape- of the chattering class elites, by funders and the institutions which answer to them. Therefore it needs to be examined and interrogated before we accept it.
This is precisely what we see in the horror of the trans circus. Wholesale acceptance of dangerous ideological positions not upheld by research (eg WPATH) government giving credence to lobbying groups and bringing them into the heart of the educational system. Discussion shut down. People like Rowling, Forstater and other hunted, threatened and cancelled.
And no we have learned NOTHING.
An excellent essay: intelligent, astute, appropriately angry.
I will never fully understand why any halfway intelligent, sane person supports gender ideology, but Harrington’s phrases — which capture how this form of cowardice coalesces and advances — perhaps come as close to explanation as possible: “a mixture of magical thinking, conformism and moral grandstanding coalesces under a thin veneer of rational objectivity …a chaotic tangle of magical thinking, fear, and the threat of social ostracism ..”
Much as I wish otherwise, gender acolytes, like supporters of disastrous COVID initiatives, will never admit to nor be held accountable for harms done. They’ll distance themselves and/or go silent for a time, only to reemerge at the next opportunity/issue in which they perceive it’s safe to embrace “the moral hive-mind.”
Who is pictured at the head of the essay? This is unclear.
Kirstie Allsopp? That is what the caption says.
Nice article, Mary, but the answer to the headline is much less complex.
They have changed their tune because the Cass review has put them bang to rights in the frame, and they are desperately trying to avoid blame (and prosecution) for all this ‘trans’ rubbish.
The debate here which scientifically speaking definitely was proscribed by trans activists such Stonewall and Mermaids, is obscure to me. Could someone with understanding both of Jane Austen’s TUA and current careful, reliable and valid, scientific methodology, tell us all what is true about the COVID Pandemic and correct about the response/s?
PS For next time, you understand.
Adam Rutherford and all the bbc are so into Woke- Transexualism, and about a quarter of their staff are gay, that it’s impossible to go back. Same with schools universities.
I have no idea exactly why so many in the UK Establishment decided to abuse children in particular, and to ignore scientific data for the sake of accomplishing it — but I can see Cass is already walking back from her ridiculous put up job of a report.
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/dr-cass-backpedals-from-review-hrt
She does not want her reputation to be lower than Andrew Wakefield’s for her being a fraud.
You can not legitimately claim there is “no” or “insufficient” evidence after arbitrarily discarding 93% to 99% of the evidence in a way no one does for any other area of medicine.
Put simply, Cass now says there is no reason not to prescribe blockers to youth and they are safe, as is per gender affirming care protocols — which are already “wait and see” holistic — HRT.
I’m reminded once again of the words of David Sackett, (1934-2015) American-Canadian physician and a pioneer in evidence-based medicine:
”…it then occurred to me that experts like me commit two sins that retard the advance of science and harm the young. Firstly, adding our prestige to our opinions gives the latter far greater persuasive power than they deserve on scientific grounds alone. Whether through deference, fear, or respect, others tend not to challenge them, and progress towards the truth is impaired in the presence of an expert.
The second sin of expertness is committed on grant applications and manuscripts that challenge the current expert consensus. Reviewers face the unavoidable temptation to accept or reject new evidence and ideas, not on the basis of their scientific merit, but on the extent to which they agree or disagree with the public positions taken by experts on these matters.’
From his article ‘The Sins of Expertness and a Proposal for Redemption’