Claims that homophobia is “surging” particularly among young men are proving promising fodder for clickbait publications as well as for fundraising drives by LGBT advocacy groups. The non-profit GLAAD has warned of a steady uptick in anti-LGBTQ incidents. This, in turn, seems to be causing unnecessary worry: Stonewall has claimed that less than half of LGBTQ+ people feel safe holding their partner’s hand in public.

The good news is nearly all of such claims of a growing homophobia “epidemic” in Western countries are completely unfounded. The bad news? Correcting this sort of narrative requires careful attention to survey design, trend interpretation, and definitional changes, precisely the kind of work that most readers and much popular media will not do.

Here’s an example. Last month, PinkNews reported that “men born in the 2000s are far more likely to hold conservative views on LGBTQ+ rights compared to previous generations”. This narrative was picked up by other media outlets and spread across social media. Soon a flurry of speculation on potential causes erupted on social media. Is this because of incel forums and far-Right propaganda? Have trans issues caused a backlash against the LGBs? Are we entering a new era of Christian traditionalism?

For those asking if there was any truth behind the original premise, the short answer is no. It’s true that PinkNews based their article on credible research undertaken by Dr Ryan Burge at the American Institute for Boys and Men. Yet Dr Burge’s research was not about generational attitudes towards homosexuality; instead it looked at how changing religious views correspond to gender. When I contacted Dr Burge about the PinkNews reporting he called it a misrepresentation. “The Pew Religious Landscape Survey data does not indicate increasing homophobia among young men,” he clarified. Any apparent difference amongst young men today and previous generations “is almost certainly a methodological artifact, not a real trend”, he explained to me.

But the “take economy” allows no time to carefully sift through the numbers. Content-oriented media outlets like PinkNews are structurally incentivized to privilege speed, moral urgency, and emotional resonance over careful methodological scrutiny.

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Meet the new gay dissidents

By Jarryd Bartle

No surprise, then, that PinkNews has distorted data before. In response to UK Home Office figures last year which indicated that anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes were down for the second year in the row, the news site claimed they were false statistics. PinkNews’s argument wasn’t just that hate crimes are chronically underreported (which they certainly are), but that the Met Police’s data, which covers most of London, was excluded, and thus “likely under-represents national totals for LGBTQ+ hate crime”. The implication was that actual hate crime numbers could be skyrocketing.

This conveniently leaves out why the Met Police’s data was excluded last year. A flaw in the previous system meant that hate crime “markers” which applied to one offense could be automatically applied to all offenses within the same incident. As a result, Met statistics from 2021 to 2024 had overstated the number of hate crime offenses. Even with that inflation, LGBTQ+ hate crime numbers had continued to decline. Perhaps things really aren’t as terrible as PinkNews would like them to be?

We can’t only blame the journalists, though. Sometimes researchers on homophobia oversell their conclusions. In a recent New York Times guest essay, psychologists Dr Tessa Charlesworth and Dr Eli Finkel argued that apparent cultural progress in gay acceptance — reflected (for some reason) in the widespread popularity of gay hockey show Heated Rivalry — masked a far more troubling reversal in public attitudes.

According to Charlesworth’s research, “the decades-long rise in the acceptance of gay people in the United States peaked around 2020 and has sharply reversed since then”. This conclusion was based on large-scale survey data which captured implicit and explicit social attitudes in the US. Between 2021 and 2024, anti-gay bias had risen by around 10%, with the trends being “distinctly robust among the youngest American adults — those under 25”.

Again, the data is misleading. Far from supporting the implication that young Americans are driving a new wave of homophobia, the reported “increase” in anti-gay bias amounts to a modest proportional rise from historically low baselines. It’s not a return to earlier levels of hostility. Even after the post-2021 uptick, Gen Z and Alpha remain the least anti-gay cohorts in absolute terms: they show the lowest average anti-gay/pro-straight bias scores compared with their elders.

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Is this the end of genderism?

By Jarryd Bartle

So what is the real story about social attitudes towards gay people in Western countries? Long-running attitude surveys, which continue to offer the strongest evidence of social change, reveal that a persistent majority accepts, not merely tolerates, gay relationships.

In the United States, Gallup’s long-running Values and Beliefs polling shows that Americans’ acceptance of gay or lesbian relations has increased markedly over the past two decades. In 2001, only about 40% of US adults said same-sex relations were morally acceptable. That proportion rose steadily to a high of 71% in 2022. Since then, the trend has evened out to roughly 64% across the past few years.

Approval of same-sex marriage in the US has followed a similar trajectory. When Gallup first asked the question in 1996, only about 27% of Americans said same-sex marriage should be legal. By 2004, support had grown to around 42%, and in 2011 it reached a majority for the first time, remaining above 50% into the early 2010s. After the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges to establish a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, support continued to climb, reaching around 70–71% in Gallup polling in 2022–2023. This year, in subsequent surveys, support plateaued at around 68%.

The plateauing of social attitudes in these surveys is sometimes framed as a “backlash”. However, the flattening of trend lines after a period of rapid social change is actually the norm. Attitudes rarely move in a straight upward line indefinitely. Once a broad social consensus has formed, gains tend to slow down and fluctuate within a narrow band year-to-year. We see identical trends with acceptance of divorce or moral permissibility of sex outside of marriage, both of which showed long plateaus once majority approval was reached.

One survey in the UK has been asking about the acceptability of same-sex relationships since 1983. According to the British Social Attitudes’ latest report, attitudes toward same-sex relationships have transformed over the past four decades. In 1983, 17% of adults said a sexual relationship between two people of the same sex is “never wrong”; by 2022 that number had risen to 67%. As expected, those who said such relationships are “always wrong” fell from 50% to 9% over the same period. Other surveys, like YouGov Polling, have found similar results.

By all accounts, despite the headlines, gays and lesbians in Western countries have never been more accepted. It’s important to pause and reflect on just how rapid this moral victory has been. In 1988, the year I was born, the UK Parliament passed Section 28 of the Local Government Act, prohibiting local authorities from “promoting homosexuality” — a measure with widespread support. A year earlier, The Sun published an article entitled “Fly away gays – and we will pay!” offering free one-way plane tickets to Norway to gay activists so they could leave the country for good. Such a world now seems unimaginable to us.

Creating a narrative of rising homophobia without solid evidence also causes real, tangible damage. Research about “minority stress” shows that anticipated violence and perceived stigma significantly contribute to anxiety and are associated with rising rates of depression. These effects do not require an increase in experiences of homophobia; they require only the belief that homophobic experiences are likely. When the underlying data is ambiguous, “rising homophobia” narratives risk intensifying perceived danger and worsening distress unnecessarily.

We gays and lesbians should be celebrating our victories, not indulging in panic over dubious numbers. Ignore the doom merchants, the future is brighter — and gayer — than you’ve been led to believe.

In those early days, the sense of an angel of death targeting a particular community seemed like the realisation of a nightmare. When it first emerged in the US it was known as GRID (gay-related immune deficiency). An article appeared in the New York Times on 3 July 1981 with the ominous headline: “Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals.” Some called it the “gay plague”.

Confusion turned into widespread panic, not limited to the gay community. The first time I heard of the disease was during a PE lesson at primary school. Such was the general ignorance that our teacher warned us not to borrow each other’s plimsolls or we’d catch Aids. Some time later I saw the government’s public health advert on the television; I remember little about it except the large tombstone with the dreaded four-letter acronym as an epitaph.

In the 40 years since the virus was identified, there has been a sea-change in attitudes. Whereas the government’s campaign set out to frighten people with the message “it’s a deadly disease and there’s no known cure”, a recent advert by the Terrence Higgins Trust reminds people that those diagnosed with HIV “can live a healthy, happy life just like anyone else”. Much of the stigma has dissipated.

The same is true of homosexuality itself. One could say that the while the Aids crisis exacerbated the hatred and mistrust against an already beleaguered community, it also spurred activists onto the pathway to normalisation. Whereas the pursuit of a gay lifestyle was romanticised — or demonised — as a dance of Eros and Thanatos, a way to ensure that one remained beyond the scope of civilised society, today the very notion of being orientated towards one’s own sex is largely perceived as unremarkable. Those who bleat about their oppression as gay people in a climate of widespread tolerance are luxuriating in a kind of perverse nostalgia for a reality they could never comprehend.

For those who lived through it, the Aids crisis was a moment when the concept of a “gay community” actually meant something. Lesbians were instrumental in providing support for their gay brothers, and amid the loss there was a sense of greater solidarity. I remember seeing a production of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart in New York in 2004. The audience mostly comprised of older gay men, and Kramer was among them. Afterwards, people were visibly shaken from watching the worst of their past so unflinchingly dramatised. One man approached Kramer and, through his sobs, I heard him simply say: “thank you”.

Kramer has been credited as a kind of Cassandra figure, one who had warned that the hedonism of gay life in the late Seventies would lead to trouble. His novel Faggots (1978) was loathed by conservatives for its graphic depiction of the sexual free-for-alls of New York’s bathhouse culture, but it was also mistrusted by the gay community for its moralising implications. Its lead character is on an impossible quest to find meaningful love in a world of fleeting sexual encounters. Kramer was criticising what he saw as a sybaritic and morally vacuous culture, and the sense of an impending reckoning has led to the novel being interpreted as predicting the outbreak of Aids.

When the crisis exploded, Kramer was one of those calling on gay men to exercise sexual temperance, and to shut the bathhouses until the virus could be contained. For this he was accused of being a puritan and a traitor to the gay lifestyle. His play The Normal Heart is set around this time, and in one furious monologue a character rails against a Kramer-type figure for trying to make gay men feel ashamed of their own liberation.

For the ultra-religious, Aids was seen as a righteous punishment from God. Many had been appalled at the promiscuity that inevitably arises when women are no longer in the equation. Male sexuality has always been contained to a degree by the institution of marriage, but gay men had been forced to exist on the periphery. There was no need to abide by sexual mores, because the rules had clearly not been written with them in mind. In other words, sex became an integral aspect of their own defiance against the society that had shunned them.

It always seemed a catch-22. Gay men were loathed for their sexual licentiousness, and at the same time excluded from the very ethical framework that would, to a degree, offer some kind of incentive against it. In his 1982 lecture, “Rediscovering gay history”, the historian John Boswell addressed this fundamental contradiction and argued for the need for a gay archetype or moral aspiration. He pointed out that when a straight man cheated on his wife, he at least knew that he was falling short of society’s expectations. But the same could not be said for gay men:

“I think that part of the reason for the ambivalence of the intellectual establishment in the United States is that they can’t tell when they read a book like Edmund White’s States of Desire, whether the life of casual promiscuity it depicts represents a homosexual ideal or the failure of an ideal. Are they reading about what gay people should do, what they do, or both, or neither? So they don’t know how to fit it into their usual critical apparatus. They don’t understand what would be a departure from homosexual ethics because they don’t know what homosexual ethics would be. And neither do we.”

Boswell was right that this ambivalence existed within and without the gay community. When William Friedkin’s film Cruising was released in 1980, the most vehement opposition came from gay campaigners who feared that it would depict them as being inherently deviant. And yet the movie had been shot in the leather bars of New York City, and the real-life sex acts that were filmed were hardly atypical. This subculture may not have been reflective of gay society as a whole, but it certainly existed.

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The ugly return of homophobia

By Andrew Doyle

Perhaps it could be said that the activists who sought to ban Cruising won out in the end. Their implicit goal was that gay people could be brought under the aegis of heterosexual respectability — that they could, in other words, live as conventionally as everybody else. It didn’t surprise me at all, therefore, that it was a conservative government in the UK that eventually legalised same-sex marriage. It would appear that we have seen the cultivation in the Western world of the kind of shared ethical ideals that Boswell seemed to crave. Gay monogamy is no longer seen as an oxymoron.

Many gay rights groups, of course, opposed same-sex marriage. To them, it was a way to control gay people, to bring them within the same heteronormative yoke that dominated the rest of society. This debate echoed those of The Normal Heart, where there was a fear of an attempt to “civilise” those who had found freedom in occupying a realm outside of social convention. To be gay was to be different, and for many this was a source of pride. An older gay man once told me that sex was far more exhilarating when it was illegal. It meant that even the most casual sexual encounter was a little act of rebellion.

But even as tolerance has increased, anti-gay feeling has not gone away. The Aids crisis galvanised such prejudices, and of course religious fundamentalists have always opposed those who they deem to be acting against the wishes of their various gods. Today, these prejudices are resurfacing through the obsession with gender identity, an ideology that shames gay people for not being attracted to members of the opposite sex and has been responsible for the government-funded medicalisation of gay youth. In many ways, this is a “progressive” rehash of Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, with its prohibition in schools against the “promotion” or “acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”.

The instinctive disgust that many people feel towards those who do not share their own sexual inclinations is seemingly hard-wired, and so what we call “homophobia” will always emerge in one way or another in a majority heterosexual culture. But at least to be gay is no longer defined solely by the sexual act, and that for one man to fall in love with another is widely considered to be an unexceptional fact of life. The gay rights activists of yesteryear weren’t necessarily calling for universal indifference, but perhaps we’ll get there in the end.

It was sadly inevitable that the AIDS crisis would exacerbate this ancient prejudice. A headline in The Sun declared that “perverts are to blame for the killer plague”. And while a writer for the Express held “those who choose unnatural methods of self-gratification” responsible for the disease, letters published in its pages followed suit. One reader called for the incarceration of homosexuals. “Burning is too good for them,” wrote another. “Bury them in a pit and pour on quicklime.” Someone had been reading his Dante.

I happened to come out in a much less hostile climate. In the early 2000s, we were enjoying a kind of Goldilocks moment, neither too hot nor too cold. We weren’t generally on the receiving end of homophobic slurs, but nor were we patronised by well-meaning progressives. My memory of this time was that no one particularly cared, and I was more than happy with that. Being gay for me has never been an identity, it’s simply a fact, as unremarkable as being blue-eyed or right-handed.

And so it has been troubling to see a resurgence in the last few years of the kind of anti-gay rhetoric that was commonplace in my childhood. Of course, it could be argued that the rise of social media has simply exposed sentiments that were previously only expressed in private. As Ricky Gervais has pointed out, before the digital era “we couldn’t read every toilet wall in the world. And now we can.”

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Our culture war is not a distraction

By Andrew Doyle

Yet the most virulent homophobia appears to be coming from a new source. Whereas we have always been accustomed to this kind of thing from the far-Right — one recalls Nick Griffin’s remark on Question Time about how he finds the sight of two men kissing “really creepy” — but now the most objectionable anti-gay comments arise in online spheres occupied by gender ideologues, from those who claim to be progressive, Left-wing and “on the right side of history”. The significant difference is that the word “cis” has been added to the homophobe’s lexicon. Some examples:

“Cis gay men are a disease.”

“Cis gay men are truly some of the most grotesque creatures to burden this earth.”

“I hate cis gay people with a burning passion.”

“If you’re a cis gay man and your sexuality revolves around you not liking female genitalia I hope you die and I will spit on your grave.”

“Cis gays don’t deserve rights.”

“There’s so many reasons to hate gay people, most specifically white gays, but there’s never a reason to be a transphobe.”

“It’s time to normalise homophobia.”

Of course, any bile can be found on the internet, but these kinds of phrases are remarkably commonplace among certain online communities. Even a cursory search will reveal innumerable examples of gender ideologues casually branding gay men “fags” or “faggots”, praising the murder of gays and lesbians, and claiming that the AIDS epidemic was a positive thing. Many thousands of examples had been collated on Google Photos under the title “Woke homophobia: anti-gay hatred & boxer ceiling abuse from trans activists & gender-identity ideologues”. The site was taken down last year, presumably because it violated Google’s policy on hate speech — or perhaps because it revealed the toxicity of the ideology the company has spent so long promoting.

If such ideas were restricted to the demented world of internet activism, we might be justified in simply ignoring it. But we now know that the overwhelming majority of adolescents referred to the Tavistock paediatric gender clinic were same-sex attracted. Whistleblowers have spoken out about the endemic homophobia, not simply among clinicians but also parents who were keen to “fix” their gay offspring. And of course there was the running joke among staff that soon “there would be no gay people left”.

And now a series of leaked internal messages and videos from WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health), has revealed that clinicians in the leading global organisation for transgender healthcare have openly admitted in private that some teenagers mistake being same-sex attracted for gender dysphoria. The result of the “gender-affirming” approach has amounted to what one former Tavistock clinician recently described as “conversion therapy for gay kids”. Homosexuality was removed from the World Health Organisation’s list of psychiatric disorders in 1993, and yet here we are medicalising it all over again.

So how did we reach the point where gay conversion therapy is being practised in plain sight by the NHS? Much of the responsibility has to lie with Stonewall, a group that once promoted equal rights for gay people but now actively works against their interests. It has even gone so far as to redefine “homosexual” on its website and resource materials as “same-gender attracted”. It should go without saying that gay men are not attracted to women who identify as men, any more than lesbians should be denounced for excluding those with penises from their dating pools. What trans activists call discrimination, most of us call homosexuality.

Indeed, activists often claim that “genital preferences are transphobic”, or that sexual orientation based on biological sex is a form of “trauma”. The idea that homosexuality is a sickness was one of the first homophobic tropes I encountered as a child. Now it is being rebranded as progressive.

As for Stonewall, its former CEO Nancy Kelley went so far as to argue that women who exclude trans people as potential partners are analogous to “sexual racists”. She claimed that “if you are writing off entire groups of people, like people of colour, fat people, disabled people or trans people, then it’s worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attractions”. It is worth remembering that Stonewall is deeply embedded in many governmental departments and quangos, as well as corporate and civic institutions. Anti-gay propaganda is being reintroduced into society from the very top.

Meanwhile, the Crown Prosecution Service has been meeting with trans lobby groups such as Mermaids and Stonewall to discuss changes to prosecutorial policy in cases of sex by deception. Since these meetings — only revealed after sustained pressure from a feminist campaigner who submitted Freedom of Information requests — the CPS has recommended what Dennis Kavanagh of the Gay Men’s Network has described as “a radical trans activist approach to sex by deception prosecutions that would see them all but vanish”. In trans activist parlance, the barriers to having sex with lesbians and gay men are known as the “cotton ceiling” and “boxer ceiling”. Now it seems the establishment is attempting to support the coercion of gay people into heterosexual activity.

Consider a recent post on X by Stephen Whittle, OBE, a professor of equalities law at Manchester Metropolitan University. In a reply to LGB Alliance’s Bev Jackson, Whittle took issue with the notion that “love is all about genitals” (an argument that Jackson has never made). Having dismissed this straw man as “a very hetero/homo-normative perspective”, Whittle then claimed that “a lot of gay men can’t resist a young furry ftm [female-to-male] cub”.

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The world after Trump

By Julie Bindel

While it is true that there are some bisexuals who identify as gay, it is simply not the case that homosexual men “can’t resist” certain kinds of women. As Jackson rightly noted in her response, this is rank homophobia, “disturbed and disturbing on every level”. Yet it has been expressed by an individual who has been described as a “hero for LGBTQ+ equality”. With heroes like these, who needs villains?

Another example is Davey Wavey, a popular online influencer, who has encouraged gay men to perform heterosexual acts in a video called “How to Eat Pussy — For Gay Men”. It may as well have been called “Gay Conversion Therapy 2.0”. We are firmly back in the Eighties, where gays are being told that they “just haven’t found the right girl yet” and lesbians are assured that they just “need a good dick”. And yet now these demeaning ideas are being propagated by those who claim to be defending the rights of sexual minorities.

The Government’s recent guidance on how schools are to accommodate trans-identified pupils — in which biological sex will take precedence over identity — has been met with horror from gender ideologues. One of the common refrains one hears from activists is that it represents “this generation’s Section 28”. But this is to get it precisely backwards. Gay rights were secured on the recognition that a minority of the population are same-sex attracted. In dismantling the very notion of sex and substituting it for this nebulous concept of “gender identity”, activists and their disciples in parliament are undoing all of the achievements of previous gay rights movements.

The widespread homophobia of the Eighties, epitomised by Section 28, was based on the notion that homosexuality was unnatural, dangerous and ought to be corrected. Present-day gender identity ideology perceives homosexuality as evidence of misalignment between soul and body. In other words, it seeks to “fix” gay people so that they fit into a heterosexual framework. It is no coincidence that so many detransitioners are gay people who were simply struggling with their sexuality. Gender identity ideology is the true successor to Section 28.

The proponents of this revamped gay conversion therapy dismiss our concerns as “transphobia” and “bigotry”, or as part of a manufactured “culture war”. Worse still, the new homophobia is being cheered on by those it will hurt most. While prominent gay figures continue to feed the beast that wishes to devour them, we are unlikely to see this dire situation improve any time soon. It was bad enough in the Eighties, when gay people were demonised and harassed by the establishment. Who thought we would have to fight these battles all over again?

Critics adored her. “Page’s presence and timing are extraordinary,” enthused Roger Ebert. “I think she will be one of the great actors of her time.” Juno won her an Oscar nomination for best actress. But it wasn’t craft alone that made Page so appealing. It was also something about her as a person — as a girl. In a period when the dominant mode of female celebrity was the “trainwreck”, Page was different. She was big-eyed and skinny, but she didn’t party. She didn’t cycle through boyfriends. She didn’t drink-drive. You never, ever saw her falling out of a club — or out of her clothes. 

“If she and her contemporary Lindsay Lohan were put on an attention-seeking sale, they would certainly be at polar ends,” wrote Helen Pidd. “Flashing her crotch getting out of taxis is so not Page’s style (this is just speculation, but she seems like the kind of big-pants gal who wouldn’t even contemplate wearing a thong).”

Page’s peers were quizzed about their sex lives and their scandals. Page talked about politics and feminism. “I think a lot of the time in films, men get roles where they create their own destiny and women are just tools,” she told Pidd. “As a girl, you’re supposed to love Sleeping Beauty. I mean who wants to love Sleeping Beauty when you can be Aladdin?”

Still, Page wasn’t unscathed by the gossip machine. The very fact that she didn’t date, and did dress like a tomboy, raised a whole other set of questions: was she (whisper it) a lesbian? “Is Juno a you know?” asked an article in the Village Voice. Ellen DeGeneres had successfully negotiated coming out in 1997, but she’d done so as the beloved lead of a hit sitcom. Page was only just getting established, and a preference for flannel shirts was hardly compatible with the part of the rising starlet.

It took till 2014 — when Page was 26 — for her to declare her sexuality publicly. “I am tired of lying by omission,” she said in a speech to the Human Rights Congress. The scrutiny of her perceived failure at femininity had taken a toll. She told the audience that a website had recently run photos of her in sweatpants, with the question: “Why does this petite beauty insist on dressing like a massive man?” With audible exasperation, she delivered her answer: “Because I like to be comfortable.”

Page seemed, for a while, happy. She wore suits on the red carpet: an adorable baby butch. She got married to choreographer Emma Portner in 2018. And then, in 2020, Page came out again — this time as transgender. “Dressing like a man” had never merely been about comfort, apparently: it had been about actually being a man. 

Page had top surgery — a double mastectomy. In an interview with Time, Page called this “not only life-changing but lifesaving”, and described it as a remedy to the “total hell” of puberty. The public reaction was widely supportive: Netflix immediately announced that it would update the credits on The Umbrella Academy, in which Page stars, to reflect Page’s chosen name. Ellen Page disappeared. Elliot Page emerged instead.

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The tragedy of becoming a woman

By Sarah Ditum

In the Time interview, Page said that the journey to identifying as trans started with reading trans people’s memoirs, in particular Becoming a Man by P. Carl. Through identifying with Carl, “I was finally able to embrace being transgender,” Page says, “and letting myself fully become who I am.” So it makes sense that Page has now contributed his own volume to the genre — Pageboy, released for this Pride month. “An ode to stepping into who we truly are with defiance, strength and joy,” according to the flyleaf. 

But Pageboy doesn’t read defiant, strong or joyful. It reads sad: the story of a vulnerable girl thrown into the entertainment business at the age of 10; unprotected by her family; struggling with food; closeted, and reminded by the casual homophobia of Hollywood to stay that way; and subjected to sexual assault and harassment by people who should have been trusted colleagues.

In the memoir, Page says: “At certain points I’ve referred to myself using my previous name and pronouns. This is a choice that felt right to me, occasionally, when talking about my past self, but it’s not an invitation for anyone to do the same.” But talking about Page’s past as though it happened to a boy is nonsensical: Ellen’s experiences are tied to her femaleness, and more than that, her lesbianism.

Not that Page refers to his pre-transition sexuality as “lesbian”: “queer” is preferred, and when the word “lesbian” comes up, it’s marked as something held in contempt, by others if not by Page. At one point, Page calls lesbianism a “repugnant” feature that directors cannot allow on-screen.

Any resistance to compulsory femininity — high heels, tight dresses — is cast by the industry as Page being “difficult”. Roles for women are so sexualised that at one point Page describes Juno as representing “a space beyond the boundary”. This is, remember, a film in which Page’s character is pregnant: you could hardly get a more female role. But because Juno is not “hyperfeminised” — because Page wears tees and jeans for the part — the pressure of gender is lifted, somewhat. 

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Why I stopped being a good girl

By Hadley Freeman

But 2007 was also the year that trans writer Julia Serano published Whipping Girl, which is probably the most influential text in terms of solidifying gender identity theory. In it, Serano argued that “feminine verbal and aesthetic expression” are “driven by intrinsic and deep-seated inclinations that are likely to be the result of biology”. In other words, regardless of your actual sex, if you don’t act or dress “girly”, you might not be a girl at all. 

As this idea gained intellectual purchase, femininity standards in popular culture were growing ever more exacting. This pressure was even dramatised in Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody’s follow-up movie, Jennifer’s Body, which starred ultimate hottie Megan Fox as a cheerleader succubus, and Amanda Seyfried as her hoodie-wearing, jealousy-gnarled best friend. The space for the kind of girl-character Page played — girls who were not limited to being objects of desire — was shrinking.

But Hollywood was only amplifying messages Page had heard from her family. Page’s mother informs her daughter that she can “do anything a boy can do”, but from Page’s perspective, this is never sincere. There is continual maternal pressure for Page to be more girly, as well as an absolute rejection of the possibility of homosexuality. One of the few vignettes in which Page recalls his mother being happy is when Page requests a shopping trip to buy “girl clothes” as a teenager. (Page enjoys the way the new wardrobe alters her social standing, but not the way the clothes make her feel about herself.) When Page initially comes out as gay, her mother’s reaction is to yell: “That doesn’t exist!”

Becoming a “transgender guy” doesn’t spare Page from judgement and disgust. (Page still seems wounded by a Jordan Peterson tweet that referred to the surgeon who performed Page’s mastectomy as a “criminal”.) But it does resolve the problem of being a lesbian: Page’s mother, at least, seems better able to accept a trans child than a gay one. “She loves her son endlessly,” writes Page. Transition also makes Page’s body safer — a body that has been repeatedly violated and threatened. Page mentions an “acquaintance” who told her, after she came out for the first time, “I’m going to fuck you to make you realise you aren’t gay.” There’s also a male director who “grooms” her, a male crew member on an early film who forces oral sex on her, and a female crew member on another film who sexually assaults her while presenting it to Page as a consensual relationship. Over and over, Page is informed with violence that her body is not hers.

Again, Hollywood reinforces what began in Page’s childhood. Her adversarial relationship with her body can be seen in her reaction to her stepmother’s cooking. Page hears an “internal voice” saying “no, that can’t go inside you” when she’s confronted with food that scares her: a terror of adulteration, of losing control. Puberty inevitably heightens this. Page describes the age of 11 as “the age I sensed a shift from boy to girl without my consent”. This is, I think, a common sensation for girls: puberty ends an era of uncomplicated, happy embodiment, and launches you into a world where your body appears to invite dangerous attention against your will. Not a shift from boy to girl, but a shift from “person” to “thing”. As Hilary Mantel wrote, some girls want out. They starve themselves, or punish their bodies, and now they have the option to disown their sex entirely.

Trauma is a commonplace of trans memoir, or rather, of trans men’s memoirs. Trans women’s memoirs are, for the most part, exuberant narratives of self-actualisation (albeit usually with some background homophobia, similar to Page’s mother’s). Trans men’s memoirs are often wrenching accounts of rape and self-harm, climaxing in irreversible body modification. Thomas Page McBee’s Man Alive features a harrowing description of the author as a 10-year-old girl being sexually assaulted by her father (the abuse started when McBee was four). It initiated a “split” between self and body. “I felt like a marionette, otherworldly and wooden,” writes McBee, who nonetheless separates his masculine identification from the depersonalisation caused by the abuse. 

Carl (in the book that inspired Page) also relates being sexually assaulted at the age of 11 or 12, also by his father: “You’re becoming a woman. Your breasts are beginning to show. I like watching you change,” Carl recalls him saying. Later, the first stage in Carl’s transition is a double mastectomy. “I feel a fiery rage … for what men did to me,” Carl writes, before adding: “I feel so much joy living in a man’s body.”

For Page, these experiences of rejection and violation are incorporated into a story of latent maleness — or rather, of boyness. As the title suggests, there is little interest in being seen as an adult male. Even his new name, Elliot, is inspired by the boy hero of Spielberg’s E.T. Ceasing to be a woman confers a sort of immunity to time. Carl, who transitions in midlife, is spurred to take action by impending menopause: “I knew menopause, becoming an older woman, would kill me, that menopause would shove my femaleness in my face in a way that would make me too sick to live.”

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In retrospect, the Noughties insistence that Page was different to the other girls could be seen as an excuse to mistreat her peers: by casting them as sluts in contrast to Page’s “good girl” figure, the media could suggest that they deserved what they got. Yet Page received much the same abuse; and her reaction was not entirely different. Rather than responding with public self-destruction, Page redoubled a private war against her own body — now his body. Britney shaved her head; Page removed her breasts; both cut away what gave them away as female. 

It feels a long, sad distance from the woman who once protested that she was entitled to wear whatever made her “comfortable”; longer still from the girl who, back during promo for Juno, spoke up for a woman’s right to be at the centre of her own story. In Pageboy, Page’s girl-self seems passive and tragic: a sleeping beauty, held in suspended animation, afraid to grow up, and kissed without her consent. (There is, I suspect, some retconning here. Achieving a career such as Page’s takes considerable determination, and Page does not suggest this was driven by parental ambition. Yet Page never addresses where this drive to act comes from, or attributes his professional success to more than luck.)

As a “trangender guy”, Page can be Aladdin: the main character, capable of making decisions that affect reality. No more pressure to wear the dress or play the princess. But the fairytale Pageboy reminds me of most of all is the Little Mermaid. In the Hans Christian Andersen original, the mermaid fails to meet the condition of her womanhood. Her suffering ends when she is transformed into one of “the daughters of the air”; finally incorporeal, she makes an impossible, fantastical escape from her betraying body.

On the surface, Pageboy is a euphoric account of Page “finding himself”: the model narrative of the trans memoir. The happy ending is Page waking up in a hospital bed, breastless. Between the lines, though, there’s another story, of a self-hating girl who engineers a flit from femininity. It’s obligatory now to be shocked by the cruelty of Noughties culture. When, I wonder, will we recognise the even greater cruelty of inviting women and girls to barter their body parts for self-determination?

*

Sarah Ditum’s Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties is available to pre-order.

This summer, I had been asked to speak about male violence towards women at a library in Nottingham, in a working-class area, similar to where I had grown up. The talk sold out with mainly young, working-class women planning to attend. But while I was on the train up to the event, I was told it had been cancelled. In fact, it was made clear that I and the organisers would be forcibly removed if we entered the library.

I don’t need a room to make my point, and so in the spirit of feminist resistance, I made it in the library’s car park. Many brave women were there, as well as the predictable group of trans activists. They rocked up, making a show of themselves by playing loud music, shouting slogans and, during my talk, one man pushed right up close to me — close enough to touch — in an attempt to distract me. It didn’t work.

The same day, NCC released a statement: “Nottingham is an inclusive city and as a council we will support our LGBT community and have committed to supporting trans rights as human rights through Stonewall. We did not want the use of one of our library buildings for this event, taking place during Pride month, to be seen as implicit support for the views held by the speaker which fly in the face of our position on transgender rights.”

I have been an out and proud lesbian since the age of 15, and have campaigned against anti-gay bigotry for decades. So the statement was incredibly insulting, if not entirely surprising. In recent years, the “holy month of Pride” seems to be focused only on trans issues, with lesbians so far down the pecking order we feel distinctly unwelcome.

I think something is starting to shift though. As I was speaking to this angry and vibrant crowd of women, messages of support began to flood in, including offers from lawyers to represent me if I wanted to sue. Since I am now so thoroughly sick of being called a fascist and nazi, i decided to go for it.

A few days after the carpark debacle, an email was forwarded to me from Cllr Rosemary Healy in response to a complaint about the cancellation:

“We cannot grant a platform to a public figure who has repeatedly expressed transphobic views. Not only are Ms Bindel’s past statements incredibly hateful to the trans community; she has also demonstrated homophobic and biphobic views in the past that we take issue with.”

Her clarification was helpful. In cancelling me in the way and for the reasons that they did, NCC was in breach of the Public Sector Equality Duty under the Equality Act 2010. It was also in breach of the substantive duties under the Equality Act applying to the Council in its exercise of public functions and as a service provider, for which the Council is susceptible to judicial review.

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My very presence at the library, regardless of the subject of my talk, was deemed dangerous and traumatising. As such, my legal team cited the ruling in Forstater v Centre for Global Development Europe, the case in which Maya Forstater successfully sued her employers for pushing her out of her consultancy role because of allegations of transphobia by colleagues.

Initially, NCC refused to admit that I was covered by the same protection as Forstater: “The Tribunal held that Ms Forstater’s views were consistent with the law [but] the same cannot be said of the views as to trans people expressed by the Claimant. There is no evidence that the Claimant’s views are widely-shared, and certainly not among respected academics. Indeed, the Claimant’s views are often deprecated.”

Their stupidity beggars belief. NCC’s evidence of such “deprecation” was a 12-year-old article by a trans activist who, unsurprisingly, disagrees with me about matters of sex and gender.

As well as issuing an apology, NCC has since accepted that it acted unlawfully in cancelling the event. As part of the claim, we also requested that NCC carries out a review of its Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) strategy, policies and procedures, with assistance from an external body. This is because it was clear that the demands and rights of trans issues trumped those of any other group that faces discrimination. It is also apparent that NCC felt it had the right to review and cancel bookings on the basis of a speaker’s reputation.

This clearly unsettled the trans activists. They began to deny that we had won at all, pulling apart the phrase “procedurally unlawful”, suggesting that the phrase means something akin to “unlawful lite”. In this context, there is no real difference between an action being procedurally unlawful and substantively unlawful. The decision to ban me resulted in NCC taking actions which it should not have taken.

The line, “NCC has agreed that, if Nottingham Women for Change seeks to seek [SIC] to make a booking at any NCC venue by way of a fully completed booking form, the Council will make a fresh decision in response to such request upon a lawful basis,” has also been wilfully misinterpreted, with trans activists claiming that it is phrased in a way that would allow NCC to find a legal way to stop me from speaking at a subsequent event.

This is such an important win because any future refusal will be open to legal challenge. And other local authorities will have to think twice before deciding to de-platform or ban a speaker because they have decided their legal and reasonable views are offensive.

For years, trans activists have been trying to intimidate feminists and other refuseniks of trans ideology but we have fought back hard. And various organisations that have been brainwashed by Stonewall, including Garden Court Chambers, successfully sued by the black lesbian barrister Allison Bailey, have been given a legal kicking of late.

Women’s hard-won rights are not up for grabs. And I think the message might be finally getting through. So let this be a lesson to all councils. You need to follow equality law as it is, not the law as Stonewall wants it to be. Or you will be sued. And you may well lose.

Mermaids claims that LGB Alliance was not, in fact, established to support lesbians, gay men and bisexuals — but rather to discredit and disband Mermaids itself. The LGB Alliance, allegedly, “does not have charitable purposes”. If Mermaids wins this case, the consequences will be devastating for lesbians and gays. Any future charity set up to advocate specifically on our behalf will be wide open to legal challenge.

LGB Alliance was founded in 2019, in response to Stonewall’s refusal to engage with concern, voiced by lesbians and gay men, about trans orthodoxy. We are concerned that “same-sex attraction” has been recast as nothing more than a dog whistle for transphobia — an argument made by Mermaids in court. We are concerned, too, that lesbians are being labelled bigots for not wanting to have sex with people who have penises. And we are concerned, most of all, by the wholesale acceptance of this orthodoxy by organisations, such as Stonewall, which are supposed to protect same-sex attracted people. Mermaids’s case is being supported by Gendered Intelligence  and the LGBT Consortium, groups that promote the notion that “gender identity” should carry as much, if not more, weight in law as biological sex. Together, they are arguing that LGB alliance is “denigrating trans people” and does not “serve the public interest”.

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But what does “denigrating trans people” actually mean? Before gender ideology captured the liberal masses, and allowed misogynistic men to scream “TERF” at any passing feminist, it was a phrase that might usefully be used to describe the discriminatory and cruel treatment of people living as the opposite sex. But in 2022, “denigration” can apparently mean campaigning for women-only services such as rape crisis centres and changing rooms.

And how is advocating for lesbians and gays not a positive public service? As someone who came out in the Seventies, facing hellish bigotry and a lack of any legal protections, I desperately needed the support of a community that respected same-sex attraction. The Gay Liberation Front was, for me, a lifeline. It was set up in 1970 by Bev Jackson, who found herself compelled to come out of retirement to start the LGB Alliance. Her cofounder is another veteran of the movement, Kate Harris, who was a Stonewall Ambassador until breaking ties with the charity after it shifted away from lesbian and gay issues to trans orthodoxy.

“When Kate and I met in 2019, we discovered that we’d both been trying, independently, to engage with Stonewall about our concerns,” Jackson tells me. “We met a brick wall. The mantra was ‘no debate’. We were also told the change from ‘sex’ to ‘gender’ did not cause any conflict.” Jackson tells me that, in her view, “something has gone very wrong with this movement”.

Between them, Jackson and Harris have spent a century campaigning for the rights of same-sex attracted people. They have set an example by living as out and proud lesbians. And yet, every day, they are attacked on social media. Journalist Owen Jones, for instance, has branded them “monstrous, unhinged, horrible fanatics”, adding that LGB Alliance is a “ludicrously titled organisation”, simply because it chose not to add the T to the LGB.

Why is it considered “ludicrous” to focus on the needs of a specific minority? The LGB Alliance mission statement seems perfectly reasonable: it will stand up for the rights of same-sex attracted people; it will uphold the definition of homosexuality as same-sex attraction; it will accept the biological reality of sex. How have we got to a stage where this is seen, by trans activists and their allies, as hate-filled bigotry?

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The scenes I’ve witnessed in court since 9th September have suggested that what is ludicrous about this case is not the position taken by LGB Alliance, but rather Mermaids’s arguments that gender identity trumps biological sex. Paul Roberts is Chief Executive of the LGBT Consortium, representing more than 500 LGBTQ+ groups. A disciple of gender orthodoxy, he said during cross-examination that he believes “anyone who identifies as a man is a man”, adding that he believed if a biological woman identifies as a trans man, that person should be able to access male-only services. When Roberts was asked if, given his view that people are attracted to gender identity rather than sex, a lesbian couple in which one is butch and one femme are actually a heterosexual couple, he responded: “I don’t believe there are many lesbian couples like that.” Many of the lesbian spectators in court, myself included, couldn’t help but laugh out loud at that.

John Nicolson MP, Deputy Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global LGBT+ Rights, also submitted evidence in support of Mermaids’s position. He pompously declared that he knows what a lesbian is, because he is a gay man. “You are a lesbian because you declare yourself one,” he proclaimed. Male-bodied trans women are, in other words, entitled to use this label.

When Michael Gibbon KC, counsel for Mermaids, was cross-examining Harris, he asked her to reflect on whether some people would understand “lesbian” to refer to something other than a natal female who is attracted to other natal females. Or, as he put it, would Harris consider whether some people would have a different understanding of “lesbian” from the understanding her organisation is based on?

Harris broke down into tears, asking: “That a lesbian can be a man with a penis?” After composing herself, she responded: “I’m going to speak for millions of lesbians around the world, who are lesbians because we love other women … We will not be erased and we will not have any man with a penis tell us he’s a lesbian because he feels he is.”

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The phenomenon of men claiming to be lesbians is nothing new. In 1973, at the West Coast Lesbian Conference in Los Angeles, there was a row over a scheduled performance by Beth Elliott, a folk singer who was referred to as transsexual (the terminology which was applied before gender ideology prevailed). Robin Morgan, the keynote speaker at that event, said: “I will not call a male ‘she’. Thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society and of surviving, have earned me the title ‘woman’.” Today, almost 50 years after Morgan spoke truth to power, the situation is far worse than any of us in the lesbian rights movement could have imagined.

The fact that one of Mermaids’s key criticisms of LGB Alliance is that they even use the phrase “same-sex attraction”, which Mermaids claim is “weaponised” against trans people, tells us all we need to know. We are no longer allowed to use the language we have developed to describe ourselves because eliminating perceived slights towards trans people must always come first.

“Sometimes one person’s demands clash with another’s rights,” Bev Jackson tells me. “That is what happens when someone with a penis claims to be a lesbian, and lesbians object. We have the right to define ourselves and not to be redefined by others. Basically, the whole concept of ‘gender identity’ erases homosexuality and is homophobic at its core.”

If it is ruled that LGB Alliance was founded with the purpose to undermine Mermaids, it will mean that same-sex attracted people have no right to campaign for their specific needs: a terrifying prospect. But win or lose, the case brought by Mermaids has revealed the organisation’s ideology for what it is: deeply homophobic and relentlessly misogynistic. This offensive contortion of “LGBT rights” will, it seems, backfire, by inspiring people to support LGB Alliance and rescue our once-proud movement from the jaws of gender fanatics.

“We are one small organisation facing a global movement to eliminate the sex-based rights of LGB people,” says Jackson. “We have experienced an ongoing torrent of abuse, but also an outpouring of love and gratitude. We will not be silenced or discouraged: we will prevail.”

Dick promised to make tackling violent crime her priority but the figures tell a very different story: recorded rapes have soared, domestic violence is rising and last year saw the highest ever level of teenage homicides in London (30, compared with 17 in 2020). Last March a vigil for Sarah Everard, raped and murdered by a serving officer, was a PR disaster for the Met, while Dick was forced to defend policing at the Euros 2020 final in July after scenes of violent disorder at Wembley.

The force is currently the subject of two inquiries, one ordered by Dick and the other, announced only a day later, by the Home Secretary, Priti Patel. The latter announcement was hardly a vote of confidence in the review ordered by Dick since both inquiries were prompted by the abduction of Ms Everard. Last week the Met was hit by another round of terrible publicity as a toxic culture of misogyny, racism and homophobia was exposed by the Independent Office for Police Conduct at Charing Cross police station in central London.

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, was said to be “furious” and reported to have put the Commissioner “on notice”. What took him so long? His volte face came only five months after Patel offered Dick an extension to her term without so much as a squeak of protest from Khan. Patel apparently believed that the extension would provide “continuity”, although it’s hard to imagine many Londoners welcoming a continuation of the disasters that have taken place under Dick’s watch.

By the time she was granted an extra two years in September last year, the scandals accumulating around the Met were becoming impossible to ignore. PC Wayne Couzens had been accused of indecent exposure on at least two occasions, the most recent just three days before he murdered Ms Everard, but he wasn’t suspended and was able to use his warrant card to get her into his car. A PC in North London was sacked for using his baton to repeatedly strike a black teenager with learning difficulties who approached him for help after she became separated from her carers. Two Met officers had been charged with taking and sharing photos while guarding a crime scene in another area of north London where two black sisters, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, had been horrifically murdered. Both officers were jailed at the end of last year.

Last October, it emerged that 326 Met officers and special constables had been accused of domestic abuse between 2017 and 2020, but “no action” was recorded in 265 cases. In a case that says much about the Met’s culture, two female officers who accused a colleague of rape had to wait three years before he faced a misconduct hearing.

In yet another case, reported by the Sunday Times, a senior detective is said to have kept his job despite being found guilty last year of gross misconduct for sexually harassing a woman who called 101 for help after she was mugged. DCI James Mason, who was a DS at the time of the incident in 2011, told the woman, Kristina O’Connor, she was “amazingly hot” and warned her that rejecting an officer’s advances was “frowned upon”. Her robber was never found. Embarrassingly, Mason later worked as a staff officer to Cressida Dick in 2019. O’Connor is now suing the Met for “enabling and normalising” misogyny after Mason was allowed to keep not just his job but his rank.

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It is something of an understatement to say that the force has problems with recruitment, training, supervision and disciplinary procedures. What this means is that women in London who report a traumatic experience, such as domestic violence, have no way of knowing whether the officer in front of them is implicated in such behaviour himself.

Dick has talked about every force having the occasional “bad ‘un”, an exceptionally ill-chosen turn of phrase that she used on the very day that Couzens appeared in court for sentencing. It’s a threadbare excuse, entirely discredited now that the IoPC has declared that the incidents at Charing Cross were “not isolated or simply the behaviour of a few bad apples”. What they expose is a permissive culture where misogyny, racism and homophobia are normalised, so much so that decent officers fear blowing the whistle because of the reaction of colleagues, or what it might do to their careers.

Many hoped that the murder of Ms Everard would be a watershed moment in terms of protecting women from sexual violence. But the situation in London has worsened since then, with the number of recorded sexual offences increasing dramatically; they rose from a rolling annual total of 18,608 in March 2021, the month Ms Everard was abducted, to 23,647 in December last year. The rolling 12-month figure for reported rapes increased from 7,479 in March to 8,740 in December, an increase of almost 17%. That’s one every hour, on average, and it hardly suggests that the police in London are effective when it comes to protecting women.

Some observers always doubted whether Dick was the right candidate for the top job. They pointed to her role in a disastrous counterterrorism operation in 2005 that ended in the death of an innocent Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes. Dick was cleared of any blame but she was in charge of the operation, a circumstance some believed would block any ambition she had to lead the Met.

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In 2014 Dick sanctioned Operation Midland, an investigation prompted by the outlandish claims of a man called Carl Beech. He claimed to have been a child victim of a VIP paedophile ring operating in Westminster. Beech falsely accused a series of public figures before his lies were exposed and he was himself sent to prison for perverting the course of justice. Officers were so taken in by Beech’s claims that they encouraged him to repeat them on TV, his identity disguised as “Nick”. Dick was in charge of supervising the detective who publicly described Beech’s allegations as “credible and true”.

In 2016, Sir Richard Henriques published a damning report on Operation Midland that identified 43 failings by detectives who spent 16 months and more than £2m pursuing Beech’s allegations. Dick’s response to the criticism came in 2018, when she reversed the Met’s policy of believing individuals who report a rape. No one had ever suggested that complaints should not be investigated thoroughly or that detectives should rush a male fantasist into a TV studio before carrying out basic checks on his credibility. But it’s women who have suffered as the bad old days of scepticism have returned, with almost two-thirds of rape cases in London now ending in victim withdrawal.

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Despite all this, politicians fell over themselves to praise Dick’s credentials when she got the top job. “Cressida’s skills and insight will ensure the Metropolitan police adapt to the changing patterns of crime in the 21st century and continue to keep communities safe across London and the UK,” declared the then Home Secretary, Amber Rudd. No one was more fulsome than Khan: “This is a historic day for London and a proud day for me as mayor”, he gushed. “It was absolutely essential that we found the best possible person to take the Met forward over the coming years and I am confident that we have succeeded.” Khan’s pronouncements often sound performative, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he was excited by the fact that Dick was not just the first woman but the first lesbian to hold the position.

Last summer, another dark cloud brooded over Dick’s head. It originated from the independent inquiry into the murder of Daniel Morgan, a private investigator axed to death in a pub car park in 1987. No one has ever been convicted of the killing, and the Met had previously admitted that corruption undermined the original investigation. The inquiry panel described the force as “institutionally corrupt” and criticised serving officers including Dick, who was accused of obstructing its work and causing delays that added further distress to Morgan’s family. Dick apologised to the family but denied the accusation and insisted, to no one’s surprise, that she was not going to resign.

Whether either of the inquiries currently under way will force Dick out is impossible to predict, given that she refuses to resign almost as often as Boris Johnson. But Londoners deserve better, and there is a bitter irony here. The appointment of the first woman Commissioner has been a failed experiment, exposing the urgent need for a Macpherson-style inquiry into misogyny within her own force.

There was backlash from religious groups, calling the move “eugenics”. But was it? The word “eugenics” can be used to refer to things like mitochondrial donation, insofar as it means something like “efforts to remove ‘harmful’ genes from the gene pool”. But the classic example of eugenics are things like the Nazi programme of forced sterilisation; a programme that did awful things to people against their will.

Using the term “eugenics” to refer to both was, I think, a semi-deliberate tactic. Opponents of mitochondrial donation were trying to associate those evil things in people’s minds with the more complex cases. That doesn’t mean that mitochondrial donation is automatically right. But the fact that a loose definition of the word “eugenics” can be used to apply to both it and Nazi murders does not make it necessarily wrong.

A similar sort of tactic appears to being deployed in the ongoing debate over the Government’s proposed legislation to ban conversion therapy. 

It was not that many years ago that homosexuality was viewed as a mental illness requiring curing: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) listed same-sex attraction as a psychiatric disorder until 1973. And as I’ve written before, there’s not much evidence that you can change someone’s sexual orientation, while the methods used to do it have often been brutal: zapping people with electric shocks while showing them homoerotic images; chemical castration; even lobotomy, as recently as 1969.

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“Conversion therapy” is, therefore, rightly held up as something unacceptable: the classic example of conversion therapy is a gay man or lesbian woman being forced, against his or her will, to submit to something approaching torture, in an almost certainly unsuccessful attempt to change his or her sexual orientation.

The Government’s legislation, though, refers not just to efforts to change a person’s sexual orientation, but also to efforts to change their gender identity. And I’m concerned that, just as with the word “eugenics”, using the term “conversion therapy” like this stretches it to beyond the point of usefulness.

Of course if someone is trans, they should not be told that they are not — or told that they are inferior, or defective. But sexual orientation is a fairly stable and well-defined concept: we know what is meant by being sexually attracted to one sex or another or both, and, on the whole, people’s sexual orientation remains the same throughout their adult lives. Importantly, also, if someone does change their sexual orientation, all they need to do is start dating people of the appropriate sex.

That’s not true of gender identity. While there clearly are many people who don’t identify as their biological sex, exactly what is meant by a “gender identity” is unclear. The Human Rights Campaign defines it as “one’s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither”. How one feels is important, but it is subjective — and unlike sexual attraction it’s not tied to obvious behaviours, such as choice of sexual partner.

It’s also not clear that it’s stable. While some young people are clear from a very young age that they do not identify as the sex they were born in, and remain so until adulthood, that’s not true of everyone. According to several medical textbooks, perhaps as many as 85% to 90% of prepubescent children who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria — that is, severe discomfort in their birth sex — no longer do by adolescence, although they do say that if those children are still dysphoric in early puberty, it is “almost certainly permanent”.

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And, crucially, the decision about whether a young person is trans or not can be much more consequential and irreversible than the decision about whether they’re gay or not. Full transitioning may involve hormones, drugs to delay puberty, and surgery.

All of which may be absolutely necessary and right; there are plenty of examples of young people who transitioned and became much happier and healthier. But the combination of an unstable concept and a major, consequential life decision means that we need to be careful about deciding whether someone, especially a young person, is “really” trans or not.

That’s why we should be concerned about the use of “conversion therapy” as an umbrella term. Of course, if there are therapists telling trans people that being trans is shameful or sinful, or that it is a defect that needs to be purged, then that is wrong, and those people should be punished. But I don’t think it’s very common.

The Government’s own research refers to two main kinds of conversion therapy: spiritual, “pray the gay away” versions, and “psychological methods” such as talking therapies. About 5% of lesbian, gay and bisexual people in the UK have been offered conversion therapy, mainly of the spiritual kind, usually because their sexual orientation conflicts with their community’s religious beliefs.

There is much less research into how common gender identify conversion therapy is. But the Government’s assessment does say that “a much higher percentage of transgender respondents (29%) than cisgender respondents (15%) said their therapy had been conducted by healthcare professionals”.

That would make sense, if some therapists are assessing that some patients are mistaken about their transgender status, and offering them alternative routes — for instance, watching and waiting, or treating some mental health condition that they have — and patients are unhappy at the lack of affirmation of their condition. And often such assessments are reasonable: gender dysphoria is often found alongside other conditions, such as autism. There are also other conditions, such as borderline personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder, which can lead to patients having unstable senses of self. While it’s important to listen to patients, that doesn’t mean always assuming that they’re right in their self-diagnosis. 

The Government’s proposed legislation does make room for therapists to “support a person who is questioning if they are LGBT”. But as one GP says, “lots of my patients are not questioning; they are very assertive that they are trans”. Sometimes simply affirming a patient’s, especially a child’s, beliefs about his or her identity, is not the right thing to do.

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Perhaps the safeguards in the proposed law will protect doctors and therapists who want to be more cautious about affirming patients’ gender identity in every case. But some therapists are clearly concerned: the GP quoted above goes on to say that “The way this is worded at the moment, I could end up in prison.” Surely it will not come to that, but it would be deeply concerning if there was a chilling effect on medical professionals’ willingness to talk about gender to their patients.

Like the term “eugenics”, the term “conversion therapy” is powerful: it summons up images of torture, of homophobia, of religious and institutional abuse. And just as with eugenics, that power needs to be directed carefully. The arguments should never be “because we use the same term to describe them as we used to describe Nazi atrocities”. 

Of course, there may sometimes be excellent reasons to affirm children’s gender identities, rather than challenge them. I suspect it may be best to let clinicians use their best judgment, in some cases. But we should be careful about using the term “conversion therapy”. Something has gone wrong if doctors are worried about going to prison for discussing the best treatment for their patients.

Una, the graphic novelist and artist, grew up in the same world I did. I spent my youth in a small, white town in the northeast during a deep economic recession;  the only work available was in a very gloomy factory, 20 miles away. Racism was creeping and insidious. The National Front would recruit by standing outside our sink school and handing out leaflets, with headlines about immigrants “taking the jobs” of white men.

Most of the young blokes in the neighbourhood became skinheads, the few Asian families who lived there constantly attacked. After they learned I was a lesbian, I was targeted by the skinheads too. Walking to the shops on our council estate was deeply unpleasant as I was fearful I might bump into groups of young men, looking for distraction from the boredom and poverty.

Even the boys who defended me against the thugs frightened me. I was reminded of all this when I read Eve, new graphic novel by author Una, which though ostensibly about the climate crisis, also considers Right-wing populism and Left-wing authoritarianism. In her book the anti-fascists deployed the same tactics as the racists — just as I remembered from my own experience, and just as we’re seeing today.

I picked Eve up because I had so loved Una’s previous book, Becoming Unbecoming, all about experiencing sexual exploitation at the same time that the Peter Sutcliffe’s psychological cosh was terrorising young women. That book spoke to me because I came of age in the same time and place that Sutcliffe mutilated and killed six of his 13 victims.

The new book is also set up North, in a town similar to Keighley. It has a beautiful landscape, a diverse population — and a lot of tension. But this time it is set in the future. It is, Una tells me, about her worries for her children and the next generation. “It’s hard to talk to my own kids because I don’t feel optimistic for them,” she says. And so she funnelled all those worries into the book.

It is all pretty abstract. But if there is a story, it is about how a young girl and her family cope as society slides into totalitarianism. Their world is in turmoil, something we can relate to in our current angry political moment; and the family fears feel familiar — like something we’re about to experience ourselves. Following some sort of life-changing catastrophe, Eve leaves her community and sets off alone to seek a new way to live.

One of the things Una was trying to work through in the story were her memories of that tension in the Seventies. Because she was something of an outcast, she was protected somewhat from the poisonous views: “I knew not to trust what people say when they are in that racist headspace.” The best that most people who might be a target for these attitudes can – and could — do in the Seventies is just get on with their lives and ignore it. Which is precisely what Eve’s family is doing. “Eve is a sort of ideal, artistic, bolshy, outdoorsy loner,” Una tells me. “She had the childhood I wished I’d had. I wrote her as a lesbian because I didn’t want the story to be about Adam and Eve, but Eve and Eve.”

In the novel Eve’s best friend, Si, is a mixed race boy who ends up fighting the fascists. He means well, but he soon becomes more enamoured with the fight than the cause.

As Eve’s mother says in the book: “These kids grow up with the constant soundtrack of spite, resentment, envy, despair… then they pick up this weekend, superiority-based victimhood…Bad things on the Internet. A few psychopaths. That’s all it takes.”

This is what’s happened in today’s world, with many on the Left using social media to bully and harangue women and some minority groups. They claim to be on the “right side of history”, but they are causing misery and distress. Eve refuses to be online and won’t even consider having a Nokia mobile. She describes the internet as being “like a virus, infecting people… and we all like to think we are immune.”

I couldn’t cope with the homophobic bullying when I was growing up; I decide to leave home to look for work. My mum wasn’t happy, it was the last thing she wanted, but she showed me nothing but support. She understood there was nothing there for me, and that my world was becoming a living hell. I needed to leave everyone I loved behind. Eve, in the book, does the same. She walks away from safety and security into the unknown.

When I moved to Leeds, it felt much better. There were lesbians, feminists and, although predominantly still white back in 1979, the city was home to a number of people from black British and immigrant communities.

But the racism remained fierce. The National Front chose Elland Road football ground to recruit from and would sell its newsletter every Saturday morning in the town centre. I lost count of the number of times the flat in which I lived with Rosie, who was mixed race, was vandalised and daubed with racist and anti-lesbian slogans. In the pubs, my girlfriend would be asked “Where are you from?”, and Rosie would answer “Hull”. I was seen by my family and those I’d left behind as someone in constant conflict with the world.

This was 40 years ago. And, yet, we can see the same flames being fanned today. There they are there in Batley and Spen, where race baiting is rife and is poisoning the polls. And the electorate is just getting angrier and angrier. I was the same back then, in constant conflict with the world. Every advert on TV, every comment from a man, every single thing made me angry. Si is angry about the world he inhabits but has nowhere to go other than into battle alongside the totalitarian Left. Si may think he is counteracting the right-wingers, but in fact is becoming almost as bad. Luckily, I found feminism before I could be swept into a hard-Left faction which would have allowed me to act upon my frustration with the ruling classes.

As far as Eve is concerned, she escapes into the beauty and serenity of nature and her writing, which is exactly what I did as a teenager in order to shut out the ugly reality of the despair and hatred all around me.

But Eve has little faith in her writing skills, despite her mum’s encouragement and praise. Reading Una’s novel uncovered a buried memory for me. As a child, I used to write poetry and, because my dad kept promising to decorate my bedroom and never getting round to it (he worked long shifts and he never had the time or energy), I would scrawl them on my bedroom wall. In these poems I raged against the poverty, violence and brutality towards women and girls, and looked to the day when I could leave that town and escape the pain.

Una channels all her anger through the book, which poses some uncomfortable questions about the kind of society we’re building. The imagery of a world heading into dystopia is powerful and scary, with Una uses the metaphors of racism and fierce nationalism. There is politics: the shadow of Brexit, the idea of northern deprivation, and the fall of the red wall.

But the novel does manage to invoke a feeling of both hope and impending disaster, as though one force is in constant battle with the other. Which, of course, it is.

Eve is a book about human relationships, and in particular mothers and daughters, as well as how we build and maintain community and friendship. Human weakness and conflict are juxtaposed with hopeful futures and painful pasts. It is speculative fiction that feels incredibly timely. The questions threaded through the narrative is, “where will it all lead”, and “what kind of society do we wish to leave behind”?

As Eve says towards the end of the book: “We’ve wasted decades, arguing about things that didn’t matter.”

In the war between fascists and anti-racists in the Batley and Spen campaign, accusations of homophobia and bigotry have been targeted towards young Asian men, and the white, openly lesbian Labour candidate, Kim Leadbeater, has been aggressively challenged on her position on the Middle East conflict.

Everyone is certain that the arguments about such issues are about the things that do matter, but are we wasting our energy by entering into conflict with those that will never listen? If we wish to avoid slipping further into the dystopia depicted in Eve, we need to wake up to what is staring us in the face.

Back in my hometown recently, I heard from third generation Asians and newly settled migrants from southeast Europe. All had previously voted UKIP. All were disillusioned with the Labour Party, telling me they believe it could deepen divisions between minority groups if they ever regain power. I felt sad remembering the hopes and dreams of my youth, and the boys from my estate who got sucked in by racists. As Una so clearly sets out in Eve, we have choices, and we are standing not by the crossroads, but on the precipice.

‘Eve’ is published by Virago

If your answer is “no”, it’s probably because you’re straight.

It happens to homosexuals, though. What makes you gay? Even now, in these supposedly enlightened times, there is a body of scientists spending time and money trying to find out what it is that makes a minority of humans same-sex attracted. The latest study was published earlier this year, and I constantly wonder why it is a subject of such interest among the scientific community.

It’s the gay gene they’re after. It’s much like the search for the Loch Ness monster, as they cling on to the fantasy that a biological basis for sexual preference does exist.

The history of the search for the gay gene is not a comfortable one. One of the most controversial studies was conducted by gay neuroscientist Simon LeVay in 1991, who claimed that gay men’s brains were “more like women’s”. Then there was the study suggestion that boys with older brothers are 33% more likely to be gay because of occupying a womb where a male foetus has already been.

Appallingly, the then Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom Immanuel Jakobovits reacted to news of LeVay’s research by saying: “If we could by some form of genetic engineering eliminate these trends, we should — so long as it is done for a therapeutic purpose.”

In 1993, American geneticist Dean Hamer was purported to have finally discovered what was nicknamed the “gay gene”. In a study of 40 gay brothers, Hamer found that two-thirds shared a distinctive pattern of DNA at a particular point on the X chromosome, which men inherit from their mothers. The gene was labelled by Hamer as “Xq28”.

The response to Hamer’s study was largely that of horror. Alarmists said the discovery would be used to try to “cure” homosexuality, ignoring the fact that Freudians, fascists and supporters of eugenics alike have been trying to eradicate homosexuality for decades on the assumption that it was something that could be “fixed”. Yet gay rights activists in the US and Britain were, on the whole, delighted at the discovery of the “gay gene”, seeing it as ammunition in the war against homophobia. To them, the gene proved that their sexuality was instinctive and inevitable, not perverse.

As a consequence of Hamer’s study, researchers at the National Cancer Institute in Washington DC said their findings would help prove that sexual orientation could be inherited, and that it would be possible to predict whether a baby would be gay and give the mother the option of a termination.  “Abortion hope after gay gene findings” read the headline in one newspaper — and yes, as recently as 1993.

But closer inspection showed that Hamer had not in fact identified a definite genetic basis to same-sex attraction. In 1999, researchers from the University of Western Ontario, who repeated the experiment with a larger group, failed to find the same link. The study, reported in the American journal Science, found there to be no more DNA match-ups than would have been expected by chance.

A further analyss in 2003 led researchers to say that they had found persuasive evidence to support the theory that a person’s sexuality is developed before birth. They had measured the “eye-blink reaction” of straight and gay test subjects who were subjected to sudden loud noises, finding significant differences in the response between male and female, heterosexual and homosexual participants which, they said, could be linked to the area of the brain which determined sexuality.

More from this author

The unhappy truth about surrogacy

By Julie Bindel

To many people this is more than dry scientific study. I came out aged 15 and was told I was a freak of nature, something I believed until I met other lesbians and gay men who had a sense of pride in their identity. This was the end of the 1970s and the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) were in full swing.

Both groups understood sexuality as a social construct, rather than something innate. For women it was about allowing ourselves to dare admit our attraction to other women and throwing off the shackles of what the lesbian writer Adrienne Rich  called “compulsory heterosexuality”. Rich argued that heterosexuality for women is a subtle yet forceful psychological prison from which most women could break free if they wanted.

The booklet Love Your Enemy? picked up on the debate in the UK, the central argument being that heterosexuality might well be enforced as a tool of patriarchy. “We think serious feminists have no choice but to abandon heterosexuality,” the manifesto reads. “Only in the system of oppression that is male supremacy does the oppressor actually invade and colonise the interior of the body of the oppressed.”

Many feminists considered sexuality purely a matter of innate desire, and the idea that lesbianism could be in any way a choice crazy. I understood that one did not “choose” to be gay or lesbian as such, more that if true choice for women existed, we may well be open to act upon our desires.

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How Leeds enables 'paid rape'

By Julie Bindel

In her 1999 book Generations of Women Choosing to Become Lesbian: Questioning the Essentialist Link, Australian academic Lorene Gottschalk interviewed three different generations of lesbians, asking whether or not they believed in biology as the root cause of sexual attraction. Gottschalk found that those who became lesbians in the 1970s believed they chose their sexuality, but those who became lesbians in the 1990s thought it was biology.

I can see why today young lesbians are far more likely than their older counterparts to insist that being gay is biologically determined: feminism in its heyday provided women with the vision that it was possible to leave a miserable heterosexual existence, and many of them did. By the 1990s, however, the development of queer theory led many lesbians to identify more with gay men than with second wave feminists, and thereby adopt the “please tolerate us, we can’t help it” line.

The men of the 1970s-era Gay Liberation Front understood that homophobia came out of a desperation to maintain strict gender roles, and many believed that heterosexuality was oppressive to women and that all anti-sexist men worth their salt should be gay. But to say, as did the singer Tom Robinson in 1978, that we were “glad to be gay” invoked horror from many gays, and terror from straights. After all, many gay men wanted to be “tolerated” and believed they would illicit sympathy if they could convince people that they “could not help” how they were.

Heterosexuals on the other hand were comforted by the idea that we did not “recruit”, and therefore their offspring were safe — unless, of course, they happened to be born with the rogue gene.

Unfortunately, immutability has never helped black people, Jews or women escape bigotry and oppression, and it won’t save us, either. The determinist case is often used to argue against Christian gay conversion therapy, in which so-called therapists “pray away the gay”, the logic being that if we have no control over our sexuality, what’s the point of trying to change it?

But as I know only too well from my undercover investigation into the practice, which goes on in Britain as well as the US< the bigots who promote conversion therapy neither know nor care whether we are born or choose to be gay — they just want us to live a heterosexual lifestyle, or failing that become celibate and remain in the closet.

It is also argued that some of us only “realise” we are gay later in life, while others remain in the closet through fear or shame. For instance, Sex And The City actor Cynthia Nixon came out as lesbian in her 40s, having previously been in a long-term relationship with a man, and she was vilified by a number of gay men. “I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better,” she said, invoking the wrath of the biological determinists.

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Battles remain but progress on gay rights is now global

By Ian Birrell

Nixon, despite being an excellent role model for young lesbians, was accused of playing into the gay-hater’s hands. If you can choose to be gay, they said, homophobes will argue that we can choose not to be.

Most recently un 2019, the largest ever study of its kind examined data and DNA information of 500,000 people and found there were thousands of genetic variants linked to same-sex sexual behaviour, most of the them having a minor impact. There is no “gay gene” as such, but many different mutations might play a small role — yet the researchers said that non-genetic factors, including upbringing, personality and nurture, had far more influence on a person’s choice of sexual partner.

I appreciate that scientists have instinctive wonder as why things are as they are, and to seek answers. But I cannot deny that the incessant search for the gay gene offends me, because of the underlying and unspoken implications. My sexuality is not a problem waiting for a cure, and nor is it an oddity which needs explaining. Lesbians and gay men should not have to rely on (slim-to-non-existent) evidence that we “can’t help it” in order to be tolerated.

Knowing there are scientists spending huge amounts of time, money and effort in an attempt to ascribe a biological basis to our sexual orientation makes me, and countless others, feel like a specimen under a microscope as opposed to a person deserving of rights and respect. To the governments and other bodies funding such research I say this: pour that money into challenging anti-gay prejudice and support for young people struggling with life. As the Alix Dobkin song goes: Every woman can be a lesbian.

The critique of this position is easy to make. It is true that in the period since the 19th century, Western societies in particular have seen a steady increase in standards of living and an increase in the accumulation of personal freedoms. Of course there were at least two very serious interregnums in that steady march – namely World Wars One and Two. And in many non-Western societies (not least central and Eastern Europe during the twentieth century), the idea that history moves in one direction might look especially fanciful.

Still, a version of the progressive fallacy seems almost embedded in the modern Western mind. For such people when a piece of territory is conquered and occupied by liberal attitudes it is then held for all time. It is not hard to see the idea’s attraction. What is hard to see is why it is so little refuted. Or rather, why when evidence emerges for its possible refutation, it is reacted to as though it is no evidence at all.

Further reading

Our illiberal empire of rights

By John Gray

Take the example of gay rights. In the last half a century the situation for gay people in western democracies improved immeasurably. From relations between people of the same sex being illegal in countries such as Britain, we have arrived at a position where gay people are able to marry, where the visibility of gay people in public life has never been greater and where corporations and arms of government positively fall over themselves to demonstrate their commitment to gay rights.

This last element – a positive bragging about a commitment to gay rights (sometimes described as ‘woke capitalism’) – is one that disturbs some of us who do not share the presumptions of inevitable progress. As Pride day has moved into Pride week and now Pride month there has (in the UK at least) emerged a sense of over-reach. This is a personal feeling, obviously, and not one that everybody will share. But I might as well express how it prickles in me.

I was not delighted a couple of years ago when Barclays Bank decided to advertise its commitment to Pride by decking its branches in rainbow colours and adopting the slogan ‘Love happens here’. I don’t especially want ‘Love’ to happen at my bank. I just want them to make it easier to speak to a real person on their phone-lines and employ more people behind the tills in their branches.

Likewise, when stopping at a motorway service station for a sandwich during Pride Month I did not feel my mood massively elevated by seeing that (courtesy of Marks and Spencer) one of the options was an ‘LGBT Sandwich’ (consisting of lettuce, guacamole, bacon and tomato). I got that instinct that I know a number of other gay people feel: something like ‘enough already.’ I don’t need my love life to invade other peoples’ sandwich selection. And I don’t see any remaining homophobes among the heterosexual population being won over by a sandwich whose recipe is concocted by acronym.

The sense of slight over-reach, or over-protesting, in part comes from the sense that some bigger picture may be being missed. And sure enough this year’s newly-released British Social Attitudes Survey gives a good jolt to this instinct.

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The dangers of post-truth journalism

By Douglas Murray

For the new BSA report includes an interesting statistic. Over the last 30 years there has been a steady change in attitudes towards gay sex among the majority of the population. In 1987, (when the AIDS crisis was at its height) nine out of 10 people thought that there was something wrong with sexual activity between adults of the same sex. Each year since then the figures have shown an increasing tolerance of same-sex relations.

Until now. At the end of this 30 year movement in one direction, there has been a change. The data suggests acceptance of same-sex relationships has stalled: there has been no significant increase since 2016. The findings this week actually recorded a drop in acceptance levels. While this is within the margin of error, the BSA data does show that the liberalisation of attitudes has, at the very least, decelerated, leaving around a third of the population in some way opposed to gay relationships.

There might be many reasons for this shift. Not all will be caused by an objection to the M+S sandwich counter. But it is striking that in what coverage there has been of this statistic there has been so little desire to go under the stats and look at potential causes.

For instance, in its report, The Guardian decided to cite Ann Widdecombe’s recent comments on science and homosexuality as one potential factor. Which both overstates the likely influence enjoyed by the Brexit Party MEP and ignores the fact that Widdecombe is not some newbie on the British scene.

In the same vein, The Guardian cites Jacob Rees-Mogg of the ERG who has in the past said that he could not support gay marriage for religious reasons (Rees-Mogg is a Catholic).

Of course, it is possible that when Rees-Mogg and Widdecombe make exceedingly infrequent and somewhat reluctant interventions on this subject that they sway a significant and new segment of the British public. But I would think that this overstates things. And in any case, they made these particularly comments after the BSA survey was published. So it’s much more likely is that bigger forces are at play. But what are they?

Further reading

Bigotry dressed as victimhood

By James Bloodworth

Again the press coverage is of little help. But there’s one reason that does spring to mind, which is that the Muslim population of the UK doubled in the last decade and has been expected to double during this one.

Lest this be thought to be the observation of some terrible hater, it is worth mentioning the facts. A poll carried out in the UK 10 years ago found that exactly 0% of British Muslims had ‘tolerance’ for homosexuality. Some research shows that this figure may be shifting. But a survey carried out three years ago for Channel 4 found that a majority of British Muslims wanted being gay to be made illegal in Britain now.

Fully 52% of UK Muslims thought there should be a punishment for homosexuality. Compared with only 5% of the wider population. If one community is growing in size, and that community has 10 times the negative attitudes of the wider community, then it would ordinarily be thought inevitable that there will be some impact on the wider society’s attitudes towards the matter. Either because they influence the views of wider society or because as their proportion among the population increases so the representation of their views increases.

But here we return to that liberal presumption about ground occupied being ground held. Amid the Pride Month celebrations and the woke capitalism and much more, I see no special reason to regard the accumulation of further rights by gay people or any other group in society as being inevitable, even where it is desirable.

Indeed, I can see plenty of reasons to reflect that in the lifetimes of many of us now living, we could see a significant deterioration in public (and eventually political) support for the rights in question. But over the years, I have always been struck by how unnecessarily hard and painful it has been to make this point.

“Batley and Spen is a gathering of typically independent, no-nonsense and proud Yorkshire towns and villages… What surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us.”

Jo Cox, House of Commons, 3 June 2015

I wish I had known the late MP, Jo Cox, murdered by an extremist just a year into what promised to be a long and distinguished political career. She seemed like my kind of person: leftish without being tribal, ready to change her mind (she regretted having nominated Jeremy Corbyn), and devoted to helping the poor internationally. She campaigned against anti-Muslim sentiment without being duped into backing Islamist extremists.

But her death is, increasingly being used as a way of demanding compliance to a politically ‘woke’ orthodoxy that will cause the very misery and division she entered politics to combat. At the risk of seeming insensitive, I think we need to call a halt to what the French might call the banalisation of her most well-known message: “We are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us.” It’s just not true.

Further reading

In theory, you’re a racist

By Peter Franklin

For example, the fact that many Muslims and fundamentalist Christians say they feel British is often cited as evidence that we are all on the same side in today’s culture wars. But it doesn’t explain the inconvenient fact that a majority of these groups sincerely don’t want a gay teacher to stand in front of their children. The strident chants of the Muslim parents at the school gates won’t be drowned out by another rendering of “Kumbaya” even if backed by other groups who might share their concerns, such as Orthodox Jews or evangelical Christians.

I think Jo Cox recognised that social cohesion does not come naturally. It has to be fought for; far from suggesting that her constituency was a mawkish pastiche of northern life familiar from Hovis ads, she referred to the independent-minded, even truculent, character of the many towns and villages within the constituency.

Even more tellingly, she called out the persistence of minority ethnic and religious traditions in what was once a stronghold of Methodism. Irish Catholics, as well as Indian and Pakistani Muslims have settled in the area, and have become part of the local landscape, partly by adapting their accents and behaviours; but centuries on they maintain a definable cultural presence.

Further reading

How should we respond to the rise of mixed-race Britain?

By Sunder Katwala

Cox herself said in the same speech that she hoped to embody that the spirit of “independent, non-Conformist service” that she had seen in her predecessors. At the heart of her message was a recognition that some sincerely held differences will never be wished away by metropolitan intellectuals. If you truly respect diversity, you cannot just brush those differences aside.

Yet, in all too many cases, authorities, public and private are being bullied into pretending that these significant cultural differences do not really exist. Even now, for example, authorities in towns such as Rotherham and Rochdale remain reluctant to associate the child grooming scandals with social norms within the largely Pakistani Muslim neighbourhoods in which they took place. The website of Rotherham Council proudly highlights its response to Louise Casey’s damning report on child sexual exploitation in the borough, which dwelt at length on the cultural background of the perpetrators. But in pages of text and a glossy video presentation you will find absolutely nothing on this question – other than to present, deep into the site, and without context or comment, a list of 19 Asian men and two non-Asian women, sentenced to a total of 289 years between them.

This is odd; because these are often the very same authorities who defend ‘multiculturalism’, by which they mean accepting that some ethnic communities’ divergent historic traditions may take precedence over prevailing mainstream norms. Some try to square the circle by airily asserting that time will bring us together. If so, I’d say that the change must be so slow as to be imperceptible.

Further reading

How multiculturalism divides us

By Paul Embery

To take a simple but disturbing example: in many parts of the world the practice of “cousin-marriage” is legally prohibited – China, Korea, half of the United States. Yet in some British communities the practice of cousin-marriage is regarded as unexceptional, and indeed desirable. There are fears that ‘consanguinity‘ may be contributing to a rumoured increase in debilitating conditions among babies in these groups. But any widespread discussion of the cost, human and economic, of this phenomenon, has yet to take place for fear of ‘stigmatising’ such groups. In other words we prefer to maintain the fiction, even if it means unnecessary suffering of children and parents.

I could have chosen any of half a dozen examples of the pernicious real-world impact of the “more in common” delusion. It has led to silence on the racial factors in street grooming of white children, in knife crime, and in chronic educational failure – all of which are social issues that impose costs on everyone.

In each of these areas, even as the chair of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, I found it almost impossible to commission research on – for example – the reasons behind the educational out-performance of Asian children compared with other minority groups – a fact attested to by the government’s own data. Nervousness about acknowledging racial difference that cannot simply be attributed to white prejudice prevents companies from collecting data that might help them to improve service to customers. It blocks systematic inquiry into the growing certainty that computer algorithms are daily making biased decisions.

Further reading

How bigoted is Brexit?

By Tom Chivers

The fiction is clung to most fiercely by liberal opinion – particularly white liberal opinion. Such behaviour on the part of whites can – it is said – be put down to their innate racism. We minority Britons, according to the liberal mind, should show no such prejudice. But surveys of friendship circles consistently make the same finding – that left to our devices, and absent economic pressures or obvious discrimination, minority Britons typically choose to spend our time with others like ourselves. Asian Britains are five times as likely as they should be to socialise with other Asians, Black Britons eight times as likely to socialise with other blacks.

And there is little sign that such preferences are fading among the young; if you don’t believe me, stand outside any multiracial secondary school at the end of the day and count the number of single race groups walking home compared with the number of mixed groups. That’s why, as one (white) American diversity trainer points out, the worst thing you can say to a person of colour is  “I don’t see you as black (or Asian)” or the just slightly less patronising “Young people are so much more open, they don’t see race”. If you really believe that nonsense you should have gone to Specsavers.

Yes, we may all aspire to peace and prosperity, love our families and, want to build comfortable homes and neighbourhoods. But however much we wish it were not so, we really aren’t the same. And where ethnic and cultural groups sincerely hold different views – on, for example, attitudes to women or homosexuality – we need to accept that the gulf may never be bridged; either you believe that LGBT people are equal or you don’t.

The things that unite us may be many and various – but some matters that divide us are decisive, literally black and white, and the sooner we admit it the better. I am sure there is work to do to understand and to navigate the divides; and to decide what to do when compromise proves impossible. But that work can’t even be started until everybody stops pretending that we are all the same under the skin.

To be gay would have been unthinkable. Indeed, ‘gay’ was the go-to insult thrown at any boy thought to be even slightly effeminate. Section 28 – a law enacted to prohibit the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools – contributed to this oppressive climate. The notion that children had to be protected from the promotion of ‘gay lifestyles’ fed into a malicious conflation of homosexuality with paedophilia, as well as the erroneous concept of homosexuality as a frivolous choice (as opposed to an expression of love).

In fact, Section 28 legislation never directly affected schools, but rather local authorities, and local authorities had no influence over the teaching of sex and relationships education. But what Section 28 did was contribute to an atmosphere in which to be gay was to be perverted, weird and fundamentally abnormal.

Suggested reading

Questioning the misogynistic veil isn't racist

By Jo Bartosch

There were no gay kids or teachers in my school. Of course, there were – statistically speaking there were lots of them – but everyone had to keep up appearances in order to appease those grey-suited ‘family values’ politicians who, at the time, seemed to be ubiquitous. (Though, as we gleaned from the newspapers that our parents read, it was those given to moralizing about sex that you had to watch out for).

During the 1990s, more liberal winds swept the land. Section 28 was abolished, the age of consent for gay people lowered to 16 and same-sex civil partnerships recognised by the law. Soon enough, politicians on both sides of the house were disowning their previous support for Section 28.

Yet debates around the promotion of homosexuality in schools have re-emerged in recent weeks. In a reprisal of some of the arguments of the past, Muslim parents have pulled hundreds of children out of a school in Birmingham in protest at what they see as the promotion of “homosexual lifestyles”. As a result, Parkfield community school in Saltley, Birmingham, has dropped its ‘No Outsiders’ lessons in which children from reception to year six were taught five sessions a year about homosexuality. The school, rated “outstanding” by Ofsted, is situated in a predominantly Muslim area.

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The Muslim veil of silence on mental health

By Rabbil Skidar

Bigotry today has become adept at draping itself in the garb of victimhood. Thus the wilier parents at Parkfield school have been careful to direct their ire not at gay rights per se, but at the supposed age-appropriateness of sex and relationships lessons at Parkfield. “Stop exploiting children’s innocence”, read one of the signs at a recent protest.

Fatima Shah, an unofficial leader of the protests, pleaded to the Guardian that she was not a bigot. “We are not a bunch of homophobic mothers,” Shah said. “We just feel that some of these lessons are inappropriate. Some of the themes being discussed are very adult and complex and the children are getting confused.”

Adult life is complex, and one of the purposes of an education is to equip children to deal with these complexities. Life is certainly not the black and white morality tale portrayed in certain religious and ideological texts. Leaflets rammed through letter boxes near Parkfield school reprise some of the old – homophobic – arguments used to defend Section 28. “There is a general policy to push gay and lesbian values to children in our schools,” one leaflet reads.

Some of the children at Parkfield school will invariably grow up and discover that they are gay. Those insistent that parents should have absolute dominion over the things their children are taught by the education system miss the obvious point that we have very little dominion over our sexuality. Gay and lesbian ‘values’ do not exist. Attraction is not a choice. Homosexuality is as ‘legitimate’ and natural as heterosexual love. “Some people are gay, get over it”, as a campaign by the LGBT charity Stonewall put it.

Suggested reading

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

By Julie Bindel

Judging by the evidence, there is a pressing need for inclusive sex education in Birmingham’s schools, despite the protestations of some parents. According to the Prevalence of Homophobia Survey, 93% of Birmingham’s teachers have witnessed a homophobic incident, while a quarter have been on the receiving end of homophobic behaviour. Society has advanced, but residual prejudice lives on.

Andrew Moffat, the assistant headteacher at Parkfield, was driven out of another Birmingham school in 2014 after parents complained that they did not want their children to “learn that it’s OK to be gay”. Moffat says he has received threatening emails from parents at Parkfield since the protests started. Parkfield school has insisted that its No Outsider lessons will continue next term, but only after a consultation with parents has taken place.

Responding to the protests, the local Labour Party has gotten itself into a mess trying to square an impossible circle. Birmingham Labour MP Shabana Mahmood urged schools to take “proper consideration for pupils’ religion and background”.

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Mahmood, who voted in favour of same-sex marriage in 2013, has since rowed back on her initial comments after criticism from LGBT groups. In a blog post, Mahmood wrote that she does not back the “terrible homophobic banners and hostile protests at Parkfield school in Birmingham”. Tellingly, however, the Member of Parliament for Birmingham Ladywood used her blog post to question the “age appropriateness of conversations with young children in the context of religious backgrounds”.

This suggests that special consideration ought to be given to parents whose views about homosexuality – owing to their ‘religious backgrounds’ – are not as accepting as we might like. It is a wretched statement that is imprecise enough, like so many such utterances nowadays, to get a free pass among the slovenly-minded.

It simply won’t do ­– sometimes it is necessary in politics to inform one group of people that they are wrong. This is true even when it means upsetting constituents who may then refuse to vote for you. On some questions there can be no triangulation, equivocation or, indeed, weasel words.

Indeed, much of the conversation – as with Section 28 when I was a kid – is framed back to front. Those of us who wish to see children taught about the full spectrum of human sexuality are not seeking to impose anything on anyone. Rather, we are trying to chip away at, and mitigate, the religiously-mandated stigma that still surrounds homosexuality – a stigma which is more keenly felt today in minority communities.

Liberals must stand firm against bigotry and insist that people are free to live out their lives as they wish. Parental pressure like that being applied in Birmingham must not be allowed to prevail. Our commitment to equality – backed up by law – is also a deeply held belief, and we have a right to demand that our point of view is respected, even if we don’t take our principles from a holy book.

The best exchanges seeped out because they were too good not to be shared with a wider audience. We’re not talking Wildean levels of wit here — not least because of the obscene nature of most sledging — but cricket-lovers will know of incidents such as the one when Australia (the kings of sledging) were playing South Africa in a crucial match during the 1999 World Cup.

Steve Waugh was batting for Australia when the South African fielder Herschelle Gibbs missed a chance to catch him. “You’ve just dropped the World Cup,” Waugh is said to have told him.

That was 20 years ago. If Waugh were uttering those words today, there’s a decent chance the world would hear them. Just as the world heard what Joe Root, the England captain, said to the West Indian fast bowler, Shannon Gabriel. During the Test match in St Lucia, it seems Gabriel cast what he clearly intended as a slur. “There’s nothing wrong with being gay,” Root responded as the two players locked horns.

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We know this is what Root said because a microphone positioned nearby picked it up. For Sky TV, which is showing the Test series, the incident will have been a tremendous bonus. After all, how many more subscriptions might they sell if viewers think that the action is going to include heated verbal exchanges between players?

Like millions of other cricket fans, I was riveted by what went on between Gabriel and Root. It was confrontation of a quite different kind from what was happening when Gabriel was bowling and Root was batting — a glimpse into a side of Test cricket we never normally see and all the more fascinating for it.

It’s the same — but better — with the Six Nations rugby tournament, currently in full flow. For some years the referees have been mic’d up and TV viewers have been able to hear what they are saying — to players and also to their fellow officials.

The best moments are when a player needs a telling-off. “I’ve spoken to you before about rugby values,” I heard the referee Nigel Owens say to a player who’d transgressed during the recent England-France match at Twickenham. I thought, great, we’re going to hear an entire speech from Owens about the sport’s higher ideals. I’d have been quite happy to sit back while the match took on the form of an improvised docu-drama.

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Rarely does a rugby player demur when he is hauled up before the ref. But that’s rugby for you. They don’t give the ref an earful like a footballer might. They’ll stand there often quite meekly. When those not involved in the incident arrive on the scene, the referee might give them short shrift. “Go away!” I heard the referee Wayne Barnes tell someone during another recent Six-Nations encounter.

It feels like eavesdropping. And that perhaps is where the problem with on-field microphones lies.

Sure, they’re great news for viewers, but what does it mean for the players to know that something said during the heat of battle might be broadcast to millions? The pitch is, after all, their workplace. Aren’t they entitled to some privacy?

During the press conference at the end of the day’s play, in which Root had uttered his now famous riposte to Gabriel, the England captain tried to play the incident down. “It’s Test cricket,” Root said. “He’s an emotional guy trying to do everything he can to win a Test match. Sometimes people say things on the field that they might regret, but they should stay on the field.”

Of course Root wants things to stay on the field. It’s bad enough having to take responsibility for scoring runs off a fearsome bowler like Gabriel. Plus Root has to captain the team. Must he also be responsible for anything he says that a microphone picks up?

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The publicity around this incident has, naturally, been entirely beneficial for Root. His enlightened attitude has been seized upon. Just as Andy Murray has become everyone’s favourite male feminist, Root is now rightly lauded for challenging homophobia and showing that the sporting arena isn’t quite as unreconstructed as many people would have you believe. But I’m not sure that’s the point.

Because while I can’t believe Root is unhappy about his new-found reputation, is this how he would have chosen to be elevated to spokesman on such matters? If indeed he would have chosen to go down that path at all? Sport amplifies everything. It’s the ultimate metaphor for life, and what gets said on the field of play takes on a lasting power. It resonates.

If microphones oblige players to clam up, I wonder what that might mean for the nature of the sport itself. The sports environment is about nothing, if it is not about intensity of engagement. Should sportspeople now be expected to stay passionate enough to win, but calm enough not to say anything untoward? I’m not sure that the vast sums many sportspeople are paid, or the fact that they might be representing the nation, puts them under that much of an obligation.

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It has made me feel quite nostalgic, and I’ve been considering those more innocent, pre-microphone days. Back in 1902, during a Test match between England and Australia, the England batsman George Hirst is reputed to have told his partner Wilfred Rhodes that they would win a tight match by “getting them in singles”. The quote has entered cricket folklore.

Similarly, an incident that took place 82 years later, during the Italia 90 World Cup, has entered football folklore. It’s the semi-final between England and West Germany, and England’s Paul Gascoigne has received the booking that will rule him out of the final. Enter Gary Lineker as Gascoigne stands there distraught. Lineker looks to the manager Bobby Robson at the side of the pitch. “Have a word,” we can clearly lip-read Lineker saying.

As with George Hirst, it was a wonderfully human, natural moment – not performed for the benefit of the microphone. And that is something you can be sure will start happening once those of a more exhibitionist disposition on the sports field realise they have the ear of the world.

The most human, natural moments are often also the most private. Maybe in sport they should stay that way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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