But it means I do understand the power of J.K. Rowling’s childhood-shaping novels. And so I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn about the shrine on Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire. Here, a tumble of painted rocks remembers Dobby the house elf, a squeaky-voiced magical creature from the Harry Potter series who was stabbed in a good-versus-evil battle before teleporting (stay with me) to the sand dunes to die. Fans found the spot after the theatrical release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 in 2010; in the intervening years, mounds of pebbles and odd socks (long story) have been stacked along the shore around a simple wooden cross. 

We know that adult Harry Potter fans can be, well, fanatical. They tote tattoos or necklaces bearing the sign of the Deathly Hallows, hold Hogwarts-themed weddings, name their dogs Sirius Black. They are cringe but they are harmless. Unless you’re in the energy sector, that is. Simon Ludlam, director of a £430 million cabling project, knows exactly the damage they can do. He was recently inundated with “hundreds” of calls from Potterheads over a project he was leading, the Greenlink interconnector, which would thread underneath the dunes of Freshwater West — right through Dobby’s grave — all the way to County Wexford. Ludlam, who looks to be a normal and well-adjusted man in his sixties, very reasonably asked “who?” before being informed that the house elf’s resting place was a “very, very serious matter”. In the end, the fans won: a 504-megawatt interconnector between Britain and Ireland had been made to negotiate with the imagined remains of a house elf. 

It has become depressingly fashionable to distance oneself from the supposedly heinous views of Harry Potter’s creator. Rowling’s advocacy for women and children in the gender debate, at great personal cost to herself, has awakened all the fury and poisonous misogyny of those living in their own fantasy worlds. Hundreds of scribblers and social-media screamers have been keen, over the years, to highlight the “irony” of the offense emanating from one of the figures in British life most celebrated for promoting warm and fuzzy values. How can this woman going to bat for single-sex spaces on X be the same dreamweaver of our childhoods — the creator of a world in which the oppressed triumphed? The implication is of a national treasure turned witch — a fallen angel. And, for many, it’s personal: some of the biggest evangelists for the cult of gender were once the biggest fans of Harry Potter.

The pipeline here should be self-evident. Many of the most vocal apostles for “trans resistance” are part of an arrested cohort: their generation festers in fandoms, hoards Funko Pops, indulges in parasocial relationships with celebrities and fictional characters. They assimilate the moral frameworks of imagined worlds and bluntly apply them to complex grown-up politics. Gender evangelism being a distinctly dweeby movement is not incidental: it directly relates to the baked-in credulousness, magical thinking and outsiderdom which has come to define their generation. 

Nor is it incidental that these themes are the very foundations of the Harry Potter novels. The series’ inciting incident is the sacrifice of Lily Potter, Harry’s mother, to shield him with the simple “old magic” of love. For Rowling, noble is the acceptance of death in the face of persecution — Harry’s parents, many of his peers and ultimately the boy himself model this. The novels’ “wizarding wars” mirror our own, particularly the Second World War: the creed of Voldemort’s gang (the Death Eaters) is a cognate for white supremacy — a murderous preference for pure magical blood over the “mudblood” dilution of non-wizard muggles. Toleration, parity and sympathy for the weak: these are tenets not just of the Potterverse but of the Christian world, too. And just as the beneficiaries of Christianity in the modern, skeptical West have turned on the Church in the Tom Holland model of secularism, so too did Rowling raise a generation of readers to turn on her for criticizing the ultimate monopoly-holder of modern-day oppression: the transgender movement. The force — the creed, the author — which shaped our values also handed us the tools to dismantle them. Harry Potter’s Christian skeleton (intentional or otherwise) put the novel’s author on a familiar track: it seems inevitable now that she’d be ridiculed by those who were raised in the cozy, tolerant atmosphere which both Christianity and Rowling, in their own ways, ushered into being. 

The Potter novels also place enormous emphasis on the mendacity of institutions and the untrustworthiness of official language: the Ministry of Magic, the magical government, is a den of mealy-mouthed apparatchiks and becomes, after Voldemort’s return, a sort of butterbeer-swigging Vichy. Journalists like Rita Skeeter are incorrigible tabloidy liars; authority figures like headteacher Dolores Umbridge are corrupt sadists in league with forces of evil. Even public speech is boobytrapped in Rowling’s world: nobody dares name Voldemort, and speaking obvious truths — for example, about the fact of his resurrection — is met with utter contempt and castigation (a state of affairs Rowling has now come to experience herself). 

Of course, the laudable moral messaging of the Harry Potter novels does not map directly on to real-world political disputes. These books are about heroes and villains: the good, the redeemed and the bad. In real life things are much more messy: rights conflict, language cannot dissolve material trade-offs, and sincerity does not equate to truth. And so, Rowling’s fantasy-steeped children came of age with both an unusually vivid appetite for moral sorting and a drilled-in obsession with oppression and empathy. Frustrated by the complexity of our strange political world, they turned on their maker; transcending upwards into ever purer believers, they labeled their founder a heretic.

Suggested reading

Humanism is a heresy

By Tom Holland

So the debacle surrounding Dobby’s grave isn’t a silly-season news quirk. The moving of a real half-a-billion-pound infrastructure project around a fictional character encapsulates the entire story of Rowling’s place in public life. Hundreds of furious adult fans gave Dobby the house elf a real-world moral constituency and appointed themselves guardians of his final resting place. When that was threatened, they leapt up to do battle with an evil bureaucratic body which, like the ministry in Rowling’s novels, are maleficent killjoys picking on the plucky little guy. They were acting, in other words, like characters from Harry Potter — the tenacious schoolchildren fighting against the odds, the motley Good Ones plotting against dark forces in the tumbledown Weasley cottage. 

I understand why grown adults came out swinging on Dobby’s behalf; I also understand why other former Potter readers cling to an absurdly trenchant moral framework and deranged obsession with victimhood. What was meant to be a refuge — a fictional world with its impossible narrative logic — has hardened into reality for a generation of perennial superfans prepared to elbow children out the way to spend grown-up pocket money on chocolate frogs at theme parks. For the fact is that these are simply cracking stories, vivid worlds with plotlines that inspire a sense of justice even in small children. Because these plotlines were so wonderfully woven, a small number of vocal adults will do whatever they can to cleave to the Potterian schema — whether it’s calling up energy execs or turning on their founding mother for being a little too of reality. In the end, the lure of this fiction was too strong for a readership who cannot seem to put childish things away.

But then the culture wars hit. And now our literary awards are no longer about merely recognizing artistic merit; they have become battlegrounds for ideological conformity. Well, in England they have.

That’s one of the reasons I traveled to Paris for the Prix de Roman Fnac. John Boyne was about to receive it for his latest novel, Earth. He is only the sixth non-French writer to win it since it was inaugurated in 2002, and the only non-French nominee among this year’s 250 books. But though celebrated in France, Boyne is persona non grata in England after an ugly spat over his inclusion on the longlist for the LGBTQ+ Polari Prize.

It all kicked off after a transwoman judge resigned from the Polari’s first novel panel when she discovered that Boyne, a gender-critical gay man, was up for a prize. Cue the storming out of another two judges and 10 authors, and a petition signed by more than 800 writers and publishing-industry workers calling on the Polari organizers to remove Boyne’s book from its long list. Despite the bullying, though, he stood firm.

More from this author

Meet Ireland’s gender rebels

By Julie Bindel

“The irony is,” he tells me, sipping a mint tea in a café outside Gare du Nord station, “I would have felt like an idiot, stepping down. I just thought, ‘you can all have your tantrums and scream and shout. But it’s really nothing to do with me.’ I had never heard of the Polari prize ’til I got on the list.”

His crime? To describe himself as a Terf. There is no greater sin among the LGBTQ+ community than for a gay man to be gender critical. And though the prize describes itself as inclusive, it was unable to withstand such contradictions, and the awards were entirely shelved this year.

Boyne laughs when I point it out. “I thought, ‘let them kick me off the longlist and see what happens then. But I am not doing their dirty work’.” At first, he urged those new writers who had asked to be removed from the list to re-enter the award. “It was obvious to me they were either misguided or had been bullied or intimidated into withdrawing,” he says. Then, as the matter dragged on unresolved, he suggested that if these writers returned, he would ask judges not to consider his book for the shortlist.

It all represented a new low in literary politics, with personal ideology taking priority over literary merit — “pure vitriol” from “grown-ups who work in an industry which should be defined by freedom of thought and freedom of expression,” as Boyne puts it. In France, though, things are different.

Full of verve, ready for the awards ceremony, he is keen to address the madness of recent years. “When it comes to a literary award, it should really just be about the best book. Nothing else should matter. Not who’s the most famous, who has the most acceptable, popular views on stuff. It should be just about the writing.”

It’s never just about the writing, though, as Boyne discovered when his book My Brother’s Name Is Jessica was published. This was a novel told through the lens of the brother of a boy who believed he was a girl. “It’s where my troubles began,” he says.

“When I decided to write about a boy growing up wanting to be a girl, I decided to do it from his brother‘s point of view. He’s trying to understand it, and by the end of the book, he realizes that the person he’s always loved hasn’t changed in any way.”

But the abuse he got after Jessica was the worst he had ever received. “I was called a transphobic bigot for ‘misgendering’ Jessica!” he still seems baffled at the outrage. “What was I supposed to do? Call the book, ‘My Sister’s name is Jessica’? Which would mean absolutely nothing to people. The walls came crashing down on me after that. I was officially transphobic.”

From then on, Boyne was targeted whenever he spoke out in support of women, lesbians and gays, and, in particular, J.K. Rowling. She is an unspeakable in certain circles. And it was after he published an article in support of her earlier this year, proclaiming himself a Terf in the Irish Independent, that the gloves truly came off.

“What’s worse is that during the whole furor, not one person from Polari made contact with me,” he says. “Which is pretty disgusting and unprofessional to say the least.”

Things couldn’t be more different on the other side of the Channel. Boyne is greeted at his incredibly glamorous awards ceremony with rapturous applause from the literary crowd, not a cancellation. And he makes the most of the opportunity to contrast his experiences in the UK with France.

“We live in a time when culture is often denigrated,” he tells the room. “I learned this recently with a prize that I was nominated for in the UK, where the personal ideologies of the authors were considered much more important than the qualities of the books.” He then plays to the crowd: “It was a French writer, Voltaire, who pronounced this famous phrase, I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend your right to say it. Unfortunately,” he continues, “some today prefer: I disapprove of what you say, and I will not allow you to say it. But not here, not in France.”

Afterwards, as Boyne is besieged by cashmered crowd, I ask a few of those milling around whether they’ve heard about the transgender controversy. They either didn’t know what I was talking about, or couldn’t care less. “We are French, we believe in liberty, this nonsense has nothing to do with our values”, said one, with a gallic shrug. I asked another if Boyne’s views on the trans issue had influenced her view of his work. “I also don’t know whether he likes French cheese,” she replied, gnomically.

Suggested reading

Stonewall and the search for meaning

By Kathleen Stock

Boyne is clearly relieved that these awards have been a sort of bookend to the cancellation. It shows that there is still hope for writers. “The Prix du Roman has reminded me of what’s most important: the books that I write, the support of readers around the world, and the friendship of those fellow novelists who believe in freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and the importance of literature.”

The worst thing about the whole episode, he says, was the tenor of the interventions by all those 800 people who signed the open letter against him. It’s impossible to be blasé about personal safety, he says. And it made him think very carefully about his response. “Forget about the gender issue for a moment, it comes down to whether or not you are capitulating to bullying,” he says. “I’ve seen some bullying in my time in the literary world, but I’ve never seen it quite like that.”

Boyne’s refusal to hide away, though, and the fact that he didn’t retire to lick his wounds following the onslaught against him has made a big difference. It has shown the British literary establishment in its very worst light. And, even under that spotlight, it has only doubled down.

Perfectly representing our cultural cringe, a trans activist tweeted about John a few days before the French award. “Appears you’re done getting awards. You’re an embarrassment to our country”, it read. Soon after he won the Fnac prize, Boyne retweeted it with a series of laughing emojis, adding, “That tweet aged well, dude. All of nine days.”

But it’s not only Boyne who’s laughing. France, too, is surely mocking our small-minded pretensions. As one of our great writers heads off to be courted by some of France’s finest literary critics, and as our literary world grows ever more timid, it’s hard not to feel a little embarrassed on Britain’s behalf.

The #MeToo era was, among other things, a peak moment for what I have called photogenic feminism: a feminism focused on the plight of the young, gorgeous and ceaselessly hassled. While any women’s rights movement needs to concern itself with assaults in the lingerie-modelling audition room, a movement solely interested in stories that just happen to titillate broader audiences can feel limited at best — and at worst, counterproductive. What about all the unsexy issues affecting women: motherhood, menopause, mid-life crises?

Behold, a new book about ladies who have reached the top of the hill and kept going. Hags is Victoria Smith’s alternative to what she calls “non-confrontational, smooth-skinned, pre-menopausal feminism”. It is an alternative, too, to the witchy feminism peddled by writers such as Sharon Blackie, who last year released the similarly-named Hagitude. Where Blackie speaks of “energies” and “journeys”, Smith is decidedly unromantic. Getting older does not automatically bring women into a cosy sisterhood, she argues, but rather highlights disparities when it comes to wealth or care work. She’s not interested in harnessing mysticism, or recycling “you go, girl” platitudes, or supporting the (unconvincing) argument that older women don’t care what people think about them.

Instead, she comes out in defence of Mumsnet, and, more generally, of women who’ve aged out of peak hotness continuing to exist in society. Smith’s hag feminism is about speaking up even when no one is looking at you. It’s about using the wisdom that comes from years of life on this planet as a woman, rather than demurely agreeing to fade into the background. It’s a break from photogenic feminism, with its intense interest in the experiences of the most visible women. But it is also different from the woo-woo world of witchy feminism, with its coven-chic and its inspirational t-shirts.

Smith offers up a thorough survey, backed up by evidence, of the ways women past a certain age become villains. They are “Karens”, demanding to speak with the manager, and sporting the wrong haircut. They are “Terfs”, speaking of female biology rather than gender identity, and, quite possibly, sporting the wrong haircut. Smith writes: “Once upon a time getting a bad haircut might just have meant having to purchase a fetching hat; now a woman might find herself having to record and distribute a public statement claiming a rare mismatch between politics and frumpy appearance.” Throughout the book, Smith is very, very funny. But she’s making a serious point, all the same, about the way that women past a certain age are not merely ignored, but treated as all-purpose antagonists, their flawed faces signs of outdated politics. Not bad guys, but bad gals with the occasional unplucked chin hair.

More from this author

The curse of Miserable Older White Women

By Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Bear in mind that Smith isn’t writing about old women. The middle-aged are her focus, not the elderly. But for women, old can start young. I remember being madame’d in Paris at 27 and knowing that this marked the end of something. Stephanie Cole was hired at 48 to play a firebrand pensioner — in Nineties sitcom Waiting for God — while Graham Crowden, the actor who played her love interest, was 19 years her senior, and therefore the same age as the character he was playing. I am not, to be clear, offended that an actor was cast as a character whose biography doesn’t match their own, but rather am struck by how readily the viewer accepts Cole as an old lady. It seems that 49 and 79 are, in a woman, the same deal: all part of an undifferentiated life stage called “past it”.

I say “are” but should really have used the past tense. One of Smith’s most interesting points is that nowadays our ability to look young into old age means that looking — and even feeling — one’s actual age reads as a choice. Where once it was only celebrities like Barbra Streisand who were commended for things like choosing to “keep” her nose, today — with hormone replacement therapy and anti-wrinkle injections — any 49-year-old women can choose to look like a 29-year-old. People who are middle-aged these days, unlike in previous eras, don’t look it unless they nobly eschew cosmetic measures — or cannot afford them. As Smith writes: “When Sex and the City was rebooted for the 2020s as And Just Like That… much was made of the fact that the now middle-aged characters were older than those in the first season of Eighties sitcom The Golden Girls yet looked much younger.” A trip to the hair salon and a good 10 hours a week at the gym and you, too, could be a “glammie”. This makes looking young forever seem both plausible and — due to such dull factors as time and finances — frustratingly out-of-reach.

Add to this the handwringing over whether a good feminist should love her hard-won wrinkles, or, conversely, do what she can to mitigate visible signs of ageing, so as to stay viable in the sexist and ageist workforce. It can feel as though it went from being anti-feminist to wear lipstick, to being a feminist imperative to look as you did 20 years prior. This new order has been sold to older women as empowerment. Visibly ageing is no longer seen as going the natural (or frugal, or low-maintenance) route; it is seen as conforming to negative, outdated stereotypes about what an older woman looks like. As Smith writes: “it is easier to justify lookism — and the attendant moral judgments — if you can convince yourself that looking like a middle-aged woman is a genuine choice.”

Suggested reading

The hypocrisy of Witch Lit

By Victoria Smith

The crux of the problem for Smith is that she’s pleading with an unyielding audience: younger women who’ve internalised society’s ageist misogyny, and who have convinced themselves that older women are those other ladies, and not themselves in a few years’ time. “Hawking a non-ageist feminism is like hawking life insurance to people who’ve been promised eternal life.” Smith presents herself as a recovering Cool Girl, a woman who reviled older women in her own youth, only to realise how wrong she’d been. This is partly an age-old, gender-neutral question of young people deeming their elders dorky and out-of-touch, but is also a specific issue in feminism, where younger women view older ones as avatars of a retrograde past that they are, or want to be, well rid of. It’s not clear to me that any cohort of young women will ever feel differently, but it’s also unclear that Smith anticipates that outcome. Given how much of a young woman’s power often derives from her youth, it seems unlikely that a cross-generational solidarity is imminent.

There are others to whom Hags might not get through. It is not going to reach, for instance, an audience of people who think that, actually, it’s men these days who have it worse, that it’s boys who are really suffering. And that’s fine, lots of people can be right about different things that seem to contradict one another but maybe do not. Which gets us to that other thing. You know the one. The real audience Hags stands to alienate will be those who have correctly assessed which team Smith is on when it comes to the only feminist issue anyone seems to care about these days: trans stuff. She’s with J.K. Rowling and not Owen Jones.

Most of Hags isn’t even about gender identity, but all books about women and girls are obliged to take a side these days. I find this unfortunate. Surely both sides agree that the vast majority of violence against women comes from male-identified men, and not from men claiming womanhood to sneak into women’s spaces? Surely they agree, too, that the vast majority of violence against trans women comes from men, and not from middle-aged ladies who roll their eyes at the expression, “people who menstruate”? Wouldn’t it be simpler, more accurate, and better for women if feminism reminded itself frequently of these facts?

Suggested reading

Does feminism have mummy issues?

By Mary Harrington

But the “Terf” label is as much about age as actual ideology, and “Terfdom” can serve as a pretext to label older women generally irrelevant yet potentially dangerous to listen to. Smith is onto something when she mentions the refrain, which I’ve also seen circulating, about how trans women look more like women than “Terfs” do. This is meant as a pro-trans rallying cry, equating beauty with goodness, and implying that gender-critical feminists are all sitting around wishing they looked like Barbie dolls, as though their non-resemblance to them were not intentional. What it winds up doing is defining true womanhood, cis or trans, as, to use Smith’s phrase, “femininity-fertility-fuckability”.

Photogenic feminism wavers between insisting that it’s empowering to devote your resources to looking like a pin-up, and decrying the objectification faced by those with hourglass physiques. Hag feminism, meanwhile, is not, as one might suspect, about the right to be seen as young and gorgeous when one is very likely neither of these things. (If you’re expecting Hags to be about the importance of putting ordinary-looking 50-year-old women on the cover of Vogue, you’ve got the wrong book.) It simply skips that focus in favour of the right to be respected and understood as having an inner life regardless of whether the typical man wants to sleep with you, or whether the typical woman hates herself for not resembling you physically.

Old-lady feminism, then, has plenty to offer young women. It might even benefit them at least as much as their seniors. It is, after all, young women who tend to experience the most severe angst regarding their appearances. This is easy to forget once you reach the Botox pros and cons life stage yourself, when it can feel as if virtually anyone younger than you is gorgeous and has nothing to complain about physically. But if anything, it’s the young women posting hot gym videos of themselves on TikTok — the same generation of women forming strong opinions about their “buccal fat” — who might stand to benefit the most from a feminism whose focus shifted towards women’s self-actualisation and away from an exhausting analysis of what men see when they look at us. What hags lack in collagen, they — we? — more than make up for in their ability to just get on with it.

Despite being marginalised crones on the fringes of society, witches are having a moment. For several years, we’ve been hearing of their resurgence as “a symbol of feminist empowerment”. From young women casting spells against Donald Trump to British Vogue producing a “Guide to Being a Modern Witch”, now is the time for us to wield our wands against the patriarchy — or, failing that, a beleaguered female author will do. And 2023, we are told, is set to be the Year of “Witch Lit”, with novels such as Emilia Hart’s Weyward and Margaret Meyer’s The Witching Tide hitting the shelves.

In many ways, I am in favour of this. Not only am I a huge fan of dark stories about powerful women, but my own forthcoming non-fiction book, exploring the demonisation of middle-aged women, bears the title Hags. The witch has long been an important figure for feminists, capturing the relationship between women’s vilification, our otherness, and our strength. In the words of Kristen J. Sollée, author of Witches, Sluts, Feminists, she’s “a martyr mascot for the women’s movement”.

And yet, I’m not convinced by some of the qualities — moral purity, stylised rebellion — that seem most important to some of those who champion her today. Real witches don’t win the applause of Bafta audiences. Women who are truly hated, truly marginalised, might be role models in the sense that they teach us what it means to be an outsider, but they are not aspirational. In Women & Power, Mary Beard argues that fetishising the female monster is a poor substitute for challenging the forces that keep her in place: “despite the well-known feminist attempts over the last 50 years or more to reclaim Medusa for female power (‘laughing with Medusa’, as the title of one recent collection of essays put it) — not to mention the use of her as the Versace logo — it has not made a blind bit of difference to the way she has been used in attacks on female politicians”.

In my own writing, I am more interested in looking at the dynamics of misogyny, witch-hunting and demonisation than in “reclaiming” witch as an identity open to all. I just don’t think it works that way. What worries me about treating the witch as “one of us” — someone on our side, representative of our values, proof of our anti-establishment credentials — is that it prizes the external trappings of “witchiness” over a meaningful analysis of what might make a woman a witch today. At its extreme, the former becomes a substitute for the latter.

Through the witch — in fiction and fashion — you can engage in a kind of fantasy feminism, role-playing standing up to the mob. In this sense, “Witch Lit” corresponds to a psychological need that cannot be met in the real world, where fear of rejection and ostracism tempers rebellious urges. By making it fashionable to immerse yourself in stories where women go against social norms, becoming ugly, aggressive and dangerous, you create a paradox: a woman can use the witch not as provocation, but to signal her conformity. It’s a way of ticking off feminism’s “bad woman” objective without inconveniencing others, the literary woman’s equivalent of wearing a Girls Just Want To Have Fun(damental Rights) t-shirt.

It’s not that I don’t think fiction writers are producing some wonderful, highly intelligent work on the topic of witches and witch hunts. My issue is with where it sits in the context of feminism and publishing at this particular point in time. For instance, Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Mercies is a brilliant study of the way in which a self-sufficient, female-centred community is rendered sinister under patriarchy’s gaze, with members eventually turning on its most outspoken member as a way to save themselves. It’s based on events on the Norwegian island of Vardø in the early 1600s. Nonetheless, the Guardian describes it as “a witch-hunt tale for our times”.

Suggested reading

Witchcraft isn't subversive

By Esmé Partridge

One of the most striking scenes involves the main protagonist, Maren, feeling compelled to participate in the condemnation of a woman who has been her friend: “Maren watches as the word [witch] ripples around the assembled women like a current… She watches, betrayal thumping its drum in her chest as Kirsten is bound at the wrists and led in the direction of Vardøhus.” Reading it, one feels dismay at Maren’s betrayal, but also senses that, in her place, we’d have done the same. It’s testimony to Hargrave’s skill and empathy as a writer that she doesn’t go down the easy route of focusing on heroic victimhood. She makes you understand the compromises. It is, absolutely, relevant to our times, if perhaps in more ways than the Guardian may have considered.

There are many behaviours I notice, in both feminism and publishing, which replicate the dynamics of the witch hunt. Accuse a woman — older, outspoken, perhaps too independent for your liking — of a ludicrous crime, such as causing crops to fail, bewitching your cattle, wanting to commit genocide or denying your right to exist. Vilify women who congregate without the presence of male guardians. Subject these women to punishments which rely on spectacle, then trust that the punishment itself will convince others of the validity of the original accusation. Create a climate of fear, so that other women will be afraid to assert themselves, perhaps even encouraged to point the finger at others to deflect attention from themselves.

In 2020, the year The Mercies was published, Hargrave refused to sit on a judging panel for Mslexia until the older novelist Amanda Craig stepped down. This was because Craig had signed an open letter in support of J.K. Rowling, who was receiving a torrent of death and rape threats — punishment as spectacle — for having had the temerity to express her own views on sex and gender. Rowling was being accused, ludicrously, of wanting others dead, and Craig, for standing by her, was tainted, too. Having read her novel, I was shocked by Hargrave’s behaviour: it seemed like such a crass replication of the very finger-pointing she’d depicted so well. The younger woman directs the mob towards the older one, like Abigail Williams in Salem, like Jennet Device in Pendle. Like, eventually, Emma Watson in front of the Bafta crowd.

Suggested reading

Why are women becoming witches?

By Suzannah Lipscomb

It was as though because Hargrave had “done” the politics of the witch hunt in fiction, she didn’t need to engage with it in real life. I’m not suggesting that every author has to better the choices made by their own creations, or that they should share the beliefs of J.K. Rowling. But if part of a book’s marketing relies on its moral import and relevance to modern-day feminism, then I think we need to question how far novels which deal with witchcraft and/or female persecution represent an extension of feminist activism — or merely a substitute for it. I’ve nothing against people immersing themselves in stories of “marginalised women with hidden powers, the kind of female traditionally hunted down or isolated”. It should not, however, become a kind of wish fulfilment, a way of easing the conscience, or not having to face it at all.

The witch is not a cool figure. No one gets burned at the stake for being too cool. Once you start claiming you’re here for “all of the witches”, the truth is, you’re here for the mob.

The Royal Academy of Arts had just publicly announced that they would no longer stock my merchandise in their shop, after a bunch of incensed embroiderers took it upon themselves to rally the virtual masses against me. Eight emails from “the public” were apparently enough to spook one of the UK’s major art institutions into submission and, without further ado, drop me like a hot potato — via Instagram, no less.

I have heard it said many times that cancel culture does not exist. My story would almost appear to support that idea: here I am, a year on, still making a living and sharing my views. For the last few months, I have been working on a huge embroidery piece; in a twist of fate that I would never have foreseen a year ago, it is about to be revealed in the Summer Exhibition at, of all places, the Royal Academy.

And it certainly seems, from what I’ve observed since last year, that cancel culture is in retreat. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t real — or that we should ignore what it has done.

Let’s consider what, exactly, I was being “held accountable” for. Why did I manage to accumulate, over the period of two years, a small but very vocal “anti-fan club”? What caused me to leave the small hair salon inside Soho Theatre’s dressing room that I ran for nearly nine years until late 2019, to subsidise my art career? What inspired the witch-hunting mob that subsequently sabotaged any of my art-related collaborations and relationships with stockists, including a regular gig selling embroidered patches at Liberty’s London?

All this was in response to an essay I wrote to express my steadily increasing concerns about gender identity ideology and its impact on women’s rights and boundaries, as well as children’s safety. When it comes to understanding basic biology, I, like most people, stick to good old science: there are two sexes, male and female. Intersex conditions are very rare and, contrary to the new ideological belief, do not a third sex make. Gender identity as an innate condition — “gendered souls” — is not something I believe in. After all, what is “gender”, if not a word describing sexist stereotypes?

I have compassion for those who are severely uneasy about their bodies and the stereotypes associated with them, but I do not accept the idea that “woman” or “female” is a feeling — an identity that one can opt into. Nevertheless, though my detractors would have you believe otherwise, I don’t hate those who disagree with me. That should go without saying. But sadly, in the age of cancel culture, it has to be spelled out.

More from this author

How Texas can stop mass shootings

By Jess De Wahls

Few noticed when I left my hair salon. Nobody came to my defence in a national newspaper when Liberty’s quietly dropped me. Back then, mine was a typical cancellation: hard to pin down, an accrual of several incidents that could be passed off as minor misfortunes, only half in public.

So, in some ways, I was lucky that the RA jumped on the bandwagon. That story was noisy, got a lot of attention, and inspired resistance. Dragged into the spotlight, the “activists” who’d been making my life harder for two years exposed themselves as the nasty bullies I’d always known them to be. The general public saw it happen, and rushed to my support. Ultimately, the chief of the RA apologised to me, and my merchandise was reinstated in their shop. It remains to be seen how long it will stay there.

The whole saga, while enormously stressful and upsetting at the time, was serendipitous in many ways: it actually hugely increased my art sales and commissions.

Still, my story could easily have ended badly. I know many whose have — those who have had their careers destroyed and their lives made hell, because they don’t believe a man becomes a woman if he says he’s a woman. The artist Nina Edge, for example, has been hounded and vilified online for her pro-woman stance by the people behind “The White Pube” and “Terfs out of Art”. She had opportunities stripped away from her and her name smeared. Then there’s Claudia Clare, a ceramicist who has recently been cancelled by Ceramic Arts London and banned by the Craft Potters association. Dance choreographer extraordinaire Rosie Kay, meanwhile, had to leave the company she built from scratch, due to ridiculous accusations of transphobia and the resulting hostility her employees directed towards her. I could go on. There are many more artists, writers and creatives who have had their lives turned upside down: some have reached out and connected with me, to escape the isolation such incidents can trigger.

Suggested article

My body will never be erased

By Rosie Kay

Silence is deadly. Stonewall — a government-funded, formerly brilliant LGB charity that has made the “T” its new raison d’être — has been instrumental in quenching attempts to discuss gender ideology. Their “Diversity Champions” schemes are embedded in many companies and institutions uber-eager to appear on “the right side of history”. “No Debate” was the rebuttal to the ever-growing mountain of questioning voices, many of which echoed my own concerns regarding a proposed “Self-ID” law that would affect women and girls in sports, prisons, changing rooms and more. 

Since the attempt to cancel me, that mountain of resistance has reached critical mass. More and more people have been willing to express criticism of this noisy ideology. There have been an increasing number of lawsuits against it. Allison Bailey is currently suing Stonewall. James Esses, a trainee therapist who launched a public petition trying to safeguard counselling for vulnerable children with gender dysphoria, is suing the university that expelled him via email for doing so. Gillian Philip, an author whose contract was terminated by HarperCollins, is bringing an Employment Tribunal claim against her former publishers, arguing that she should not have been discriminated against for holding and expressing gender-critical views.

All this has led to the “Self-ID” law being scrapped and “gender-critical” views (or rather, an understanding of science and biology) being protected in law. Meanwhile, many employers have actually left the Stonewall “Diversity Champions” scheme, after recognising that it creates a hostile work environment for people, like me, who are not taken with gender ideology. Among them are Channel 4, Ofsted, the Cabinet Office, and the UK’s equality watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). 

Common sense is, slowly, returning to public discourse.

Suggested article

The week the trans spell was broken

By Hadley Freeman

It is essential for the people in charge to step up when gender ideology activists go too far. My own story illustrates that fact. When all hell broke loose last year, the Royal Academician David Mach reached out to convey his dismay at what had been done to me. After all, art requires freedom, and I had been cancelled for doing what all artists do: express our thoughts through our work. That should have bothered many more creatives, yet he was an isolated voice at the time.

A few months later, he contacted me again. Each Royal Academician involved with the Summer Exhibition can issue a few invitations to the annual Summer Show to artists they would like to participate. These artists do not have to go through the usual application process. David invited me. I know this wasn’t an easy stand for him to take; I am very grateful that he took it. And I accepted, of course.

Rest assured, this won’t go down well with the guild of envious embroiderers, much less all those who would like me to never say a word again, have any commercial success, or be given a platform as an artist. I am braced for them to screech: “How can you support this witch, especially during Pride month!?” They are screaming into a void. I’m not afraid of the lies, the smears, the intimidation. Truth has a habit of revealing itself in the end.

Concerned and influential voices within the arts are starting to come together, to protect one of our cornerstones: freedom of expression. JK Rowling and Graham Linehan bravely led the charge against this growing authoritarian movement, enduring considerable harassment. Finally, it seems, more and more people are willing to stick their head above the parapet. Comedians Dave Chappelle, Ricky Gervais and Bill Maher have publicly “come out” for common sense, taking on the zealots this movement has produced. The rather erratic protests they triggered helped highlight the absurdity of a movement that purports to have inclusivity and diversity at its heart, while trying to eradicate any dissenting voices that don’t toe the party line.

It’s a hopeful sign of the times that Netflix recently came forward to say it will not censor or reject people or shows on the grounds that they may make some people feel uncomfortable. A statement read: “If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.” Cultural institutions, take note!

Suggested article

I was hounded out of school for 'transphobia'

By Julie Bindel

Despite all the effort made by self-proclaimed “trans rights activists”, people in positions of power are finally realising that the movement’s temper tantrums have held far too many companies and institutions hostage for far too long. Have the adults finally come back into the room? Have years and years of grassroots feminist activism — by organisations such as Woman’s Place UK, Fair Play For Women and Sex Matters — finally shaken people awake, before we sleepwalk into disaster?

It’s easy to be discouraged sometimes. Particularly during the corporate festival that Pride Month has become: a month in which many companies, and even the police, rush blindly to pledge their allegiance to the ever-expanding LGBT+++ movement. (Mattel, for example, has a new “Trans Barbie”: same old sexist stereotypes but with a twist!) “Diversity and Inclusion” has become big business these days.

Meanwhile, many LGB people feel thoroughly disheartened — excluded from a movement that is supposed to champion them. What started as a protest for people’s right to be free to love who they love without stigma and discrimination has become a hostile environment. This is particularly true for those lesbians who point out that they experience same-sex attraction (not same-gender) — and that excluding males, however they identify, is not transphobic, but the very grounds on which their sexuality is based. 

This too shall pass. In the year since I was cancelled, the tide has turned. Common sense will prevail and when it does, we will perhaps have learned a thing or two about genuine tolerance, compassion, diversity and inclusion.

In the meantime, you can see my work at this year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. It is entitled: “Nevertheless She Persisted.”

So I truck up to Il Portico with my book and, very irritatingly, it is full. Then I try James’s sister restaurant Pino next door. Also full. James spots me and apologises. It’s booked out for a fundraiser for Ukraine, he explains. As I turn and begin to walk out, slightly disconsolate, my friend Suzanne Moore — old mates from The Guardian days — gets up to say hi. “Stay,” she insists. Well, there is only one seat left. I don’t know anyone. But I sit down as invited. “Hello,” says the woman opposite. “I’m Jo”.

We chatted about politics and class. What a strange night. Later, after too many Chiantis, I pay silly money to have a rescued parrot in Sumatra named after my wife in the auction. I don’t care. It’s all for Ukraine. We raised £18,500 that evening.

A few days later, James had his restaurant windows smashed in. Then he starts to get a succession of one-star online reviews, complaining that the restaurant is not welcoming to trans people. “A supporter of transphobia and the food is dry to boot,” says one. Then, when these are taken down by Google, a load more reviews appear saying the food is rubbish and the place is dirty. Google won’t take these down because, who knows, they might be genuine reviews. Trust me, the food is delicious and the place is spotless. But the people who want to bring down James’s restaurant have worked out how to play the game. All this because J.K. Rowling sat at one of his tables and ate his pasta.

Suggested reading

JK Rowling and the lunch of secrets

By Julie Bindel

I haven’t written about the trans issue before for two reasons. First, because I know two people who have transitioned and, as a pastor, my first responsibility is to love them. In both cases, I believe that transitioning was the right thing for them to do and that they are more authentic human beings, more reconciled with who they are, for having done so. Both are, I believe, much happier now. And I certainly wouldn’t want to say anything that might hurt them.

And second, because I am a cis white middle-class middle-aged man, and I have always thought this is a subject on which I ought to mind my privilege and simply shut up. But when your friend gets his windows smashed in, you can’t just sit on the sidelines and say nothing. Suddenly, the sidelines feel like cowardice. In retrospect, silence was my privileged position.

My own view, for what it is worth, is that under late capitalism we have come to accord the very idea of choice more power that it does or indeed should have. In the world of virtual reality, you can be whatever or whomever you choose. But in the real world, choosing to be something doesn’t make it so. The idea that the world is fundamentally malleable by our choices is to imagine a world in which human beings are at the centre and in control of everything, a world in which everything can be bent to our will.

Religious people can’t possibly agree with this. I believe in limits, in the givenness of some things. And, it seems to me, biological sex is one of them. I find the use of medical technology to transgress these limits to be Faustian in its hubris. Others will say all this better than me. The only reason I mention it is because it has become an issue about standing up to be counted. James’s smashed windows made it about that. This is not a column about sexual politics — it is about bullying, pure and simple.

Suggested reading

Stella Creasy's bourgeois feminism

By Julie Bindel

Because some transactivists now behave as though anything they can do for the cause is justified, however cruel: get people sacked, ruin their businesses, be vile to others online. The public sphere is becoming so unpleasant, so full of vitriol and accusation, that many of us just put on our tin hats and retreat from the conversation. To be honest, I have been quite content that my privilege has, until now, encouraged me to think that the best thing for me to do is to sit this one out and say nothing. I have been hiding behind this terribly convenient self-denying ordinance, leaving the likes of J.K. Rowling and Suzanne Moore to take all the heat, my courage being a few pathetic “likes” on Twitter.

This is where I stand. Of course, I will use your preferred pronouns. It is a basic matter of politeness to call people how they would like to be called. And I can see that some people live with an enormous tension between their given sex and the way they have come to think of themselves. My default response is to affirm these decisions, precisely because I haven’t had to face such emotionally complex issues and I thought it best to listen more than to speak. But this, of course, can be yet another alibi for keeping quiet while others take bucketloads of online shit.

But I do believe that there is a stubbornness to reality that cannot be overcome simply through an act of choice. And if that makes me a Terf, then so be it.

Kate, the pupil in question (whose name we have changed), contacted me on social media. She had seen my condemnation of Jones’s attempts to, in my view, discredit the story and wanted to tell it in her own words. In any case Jones was wrong: her school couldn’t be named for legal reasons — and the children couldn’t be identified. So we meet in central London. She seems wise beyond her 19 years and remarkably articulate: she gives the impression she reads Dostoevsky and Socrates for fun.

“Announcing it via Twitter — that was vindictive,” she says of Jones. “Finding the school — think how much harm he could do to its reputation. If it was ruined, how could it do better in future? He seemed convinced it was just a case of high school bullying that was contrived by a bigot to victimise herself.”

She goes on to tell me what happened, pausing often to compose herself. A politician who sits in the House of Lords visited the school to give a talk on their campaigning for LGBT rights. It was compulsory for the Sixth Form to attend. This peer was dogmatic from the very beginning, claiming that trans people are denied human rights and suggested that the House of Lords is shot through with bigotry. Kate was “disconcerted” by the speaker’s “righteous denunciation of her peers as irredeemably transphobic”. So, after careful consideration, she decided to ask a question relating to how the definition of “woman” differs between critical theory and biological reality.

More from this author

New York is betraying rape victims

By Julie Bindel

When Kate asked about how to achieve productive consensus when there are such opposing views, the peer accused her of reducing the issue to semantics. “I said, ‘I respectfully disagree’, and thought that was the best place to leave it.” At this point, though Kate didn’t realise it at the time, one of her fellow pupils ran out the room crying.

Afterwards, Kate heard several students talking about “transphobia”, and saying that Kate had caused them real harm. Later, the allegations grew: some claimed Kate had caused trans students to consider suicide. When she went to collect her bag from the locker room, she encountered the head girl, who treated her coldly. Then, a number of students circled her and started calling her names: Nazi, bigot, fascist, transphobe, homophobe, racist, cunt.

“I felt their spit on my face,” she says. Shaking, she broke out of the circle and ran, only to fall to the floor. One student, in distress, ran after Kate to ask if she was OK. And later, the Head of Sixth Form asked the students who had berated Kate: “How could you do this?”

But Kate’s ordeal was far from over. Arriving at school the following morning, she found her desk covered in printouts of trans flags, each emblazoned with the text: “Trans right are human rights”. The day after, the other sixth-formers staged a spontaneous “Trans Day of Visibility”, some students coming to school dressed in pink, white and blue, the colours of the trans flag. No one had told Kate about it.

Suggested reading

How the Guardian enables Owen Jones

By Suzanne Moore

An investigation was opened into the alleged bullying of Kate, and the Deputy Head interviewed several of the students, including Kate. Then, a few days later, Kate came into school only to overhear her favourite teacher apologising to her fellow sixth-formers for focusing on Kate and allowing others to be distressed by her “terrible, hateful behaviour”.

Later, a second investigation was launched, “to justify the reaction of the girls”, says Kate — one that focused on her allegedly “‘provocative’ history, going back five years”.

Feeling distressed after what she felt was public condemnation, Kate self-harmed on school premises. She was then asked to stay home for several weeks, “because I was seen as a danger to myself and to other students”.

Eventually, Kate returned to school. She was keen to get on with her studies; she’d previously had to retake her GCSE year because she’d been hospitalised with anorexia. However, she was made to sit in the library, separate from other students, “just surrounded by books and my own thoughts”. The isolation had a terrible impact on her mental health. “I started to see food as completely unappetising again.” But when she asked to go back into school properly, she was told that she had “distressed” the students for too many years, when all they had done was look out for her.

Then she decided she’d had enough. She cleared her locker, walked out of the school, and never went back. Kate is continuing her studies online and is on course to begin university by the time she’s 21. “I will feel as if I’m a mature student,” she laughs.

Suggested reading

You can't be born in the wrong body

By Ellen Pasternack

It’s clear that some of Kate’s views on trans issues have developed as a result of her personal experience of anorexia. “I couldn’t help but hear the anorexic mentality reverberate in conversations of gender dysphoria,” she says. “Both aspire to reach an idealised, elusive form of the self. Both are driven by a desire to control one’s reality.”

She had experienced some “very traumatic health incidents” as a teenager; after spending a year in hospital, aged 13, being treated for her eating disorder with other girls from very different backgrounds, Kate re-entered the world “fundamentally changed”. Her school had also changed. It had become involved with Stonewall and there were several girls identifying as non-binary or trans. But the school had always been more liberal than establishment, and Kate was fond of many of her teachers. It was these positive experiences that made her feel she could question, out loud, whether she was a “bad person” for doubting trans ideology.

“Why would they turn on me so viciously?” Kate wondered.

“I’m not denying the validity of medical transition as a means to stifle anguish,” she adds. But there is a difference, says Kate, between transitioning to control one’s perception of oneself, which relies on external social validation, and doing so to alleviate profound psychological distress. “In accepting the constraints of biological reality you’re assuming both a burden and responsibility. I empathise with that. It must be unfathomably difficult.” During the height of her anorexia, she felt that “I would kill myself if I gained weight”.

Kate told me didn’t know what she wants to do with her life, but that she “can’t wait” to get to university. She is nervous, though, about entering another place of education in today’s climate. She fears that, these days, “there is no forgiveness for those branded with the damning suffix of ‘–phobic’”.

It was late August 2019 when a message popped up in my Twitter inbox from J.K. Rowling. I had noticed that she had begun to follow me on Twitter a few months earlier, along with a number of feminists, and I was delighted to hear from her.

“I’ve just seen that you’re in contact with Magdelen Berns,” she wrote. Berns was a young lesbian who, after being silenced at her university, made YouTube videos tackling the absurdity of transgender ideology. She was popular, hilarious and informative. I say was; Berns, in her 30s, was dying of a brain tumour. I planned to visit her at a hospice in Edinburgh and had put a call out on Twitter to any women who wished to send her a message.

I knew that she would be delighted to hear from Rowling. A few weeks beforehand, during an excitable telephone conversation, she had already told me that “JK is following me!” Berns was thrilled to have her work recognised by one of the most famous and successful women on the planet, and I was thrilled to carry her message.

I kept in touch with Berns after my return from Edinburgh, until she died in September. Rowling and I also stayed in contact, bonded by our feminism and our “simply not having it” attitude. Then, three months later, Maya Forstater lost her job for stating that sex is real. Rowling was furious, and her tweet to that effect has become the stuff of legend. #IStandWithMaya, she said, and all hell broke loose.

Suggested reading

How cancel culture hurts the Left

By Kat Rosenfield

On one side, British women were galvanised into action. On the other, the fact that this wealthy, powerful, successful and uncancellable woman was not only expressing her opinion, but doing so in public, inspired a tsunami of abuse. For the crime of having perfectly reasonable views on women’s sex-based rights, Rowling was harassed on social media and beyond. There were death threats, rape threats, doxxings, and wild accusations. Each time, they became more and more extreme, and even, in some places, normalised and justified.

During this period, many other feminists came in for the same treatment, but no one with a profile that came near to matching Rowling’s. Under fire from extreme trans rights activists, a core group of us formed a bond. It was, however, not formed in defiance of them, but around the beating heart of our movement; for women, for girls, for our rights and our protections, and against misogyny and male violence, whatever form that eternal chimera is currently taking.

Here’s the rub. The kind of threats and abuse sent to Rowling, to me and to others are designed to make us feel isolated, afraid, alone. Patriarchy is all about dividing women and ensuring we don’t share our experiences. Why? Because when women talk, we realise our experiences are quite similar when it comes to male violence and abuse. We realise that all the gaslighting, all the lies told to us, have a common thread. We realise that the guilt, blame and shame of what happened should not belong to us, but to the perpetrators.

And when we bond like that over our common experiences, in what some of us still call “sisterhood”, we are powerful beyond measure. We support each other, emotionally and practically. We organise, agitate, fight. The haters try to stop us. But what they don’t realise is that being under fire is a recipe for solidarity.

No woman is safe from this kind of attention. Martina Navratilova has a long history of being a very public ally to everybody in the LGBTQ rainbow, and yet was still subjected to foul abuse from radical trans rights activists. What was her sin? She questioned whether biological males should compete against women in sports. But the more they came after us, the closer and more supportive our coven became until one day, another DM dropped into my inbox, again from Rowling, this time to a dozen or so of us. It was an invitation. To lunch.

Suggested reading

How philosophy sacrificed the truth

By Kathleen Stock

Like many journalists, I love a good lunch. It’s not like the old days where it would be a three-bottle job, beginning at 12:30 after you’d filed your copy, and ending with the restaurant chucking you out at 5pm. But there is something extremely decadent about getting a bit lashed of an afternoon, with a convivial group consuming fine wine and food. And that is exactly what happened last Sunday.

The problem? We were all women, and to make matters worse, feminists. The icing on the cake was that Rowling was the host, and her guests all known for standing up against extreme transgender ideology and for women’s sex-based rights. That was bad enough, but the fact that we got up to hijinks, and had the temerity to laugh, and drink wine, and eat pasta, and have a bloody brilliant time, and do it on camera, was simply too much for some people. Can you imagine? The cheek of it.

I’d had enough experience of these things to know, beforehand, that there would be some sort of reaction, but I was genuinely surprised by the scale of it. Several national newspapers, radio programmes and talkshows covered it as some fascinating event rather than just ladies who luncheon. I was not surprised, however, by the sheer warmth of many feminists, and even a few men, who lit up social media with their good wishes for us. Nor was I surprised by the fact that there was a backlash from the blue-fringed brigade; the anger and pure spite was palpable, and once word got out that we witches had got together and had some fun, the pile on began.

First, were the handmaidens. One woman, a well-known author with pronouns in her biography, suggested that we were “patting ourselves on the back for solving feminism because of the mutual dislike of trans people”. Then another woman, a comedian, again with the pronouns, kicked off big time, saying that she had had a “mad, angry cry about the photos of J.K. Rowling at the TERF gathering. It’s disgusting how members of our own community can be so hateful”. And of course, Twitter in all its glory was soon awash with the hashtag #MadAngryCry.

Then the boys joined in. Craig Murray, who describes himself as a historian and human rights activist, seemed to think that our event was disrespectful to a man accused of the rape and sexual assault of two women. “While [Suzanne] Moore was knocking back expensive wine in a shit venue with fellow “victim” J. K. Rowling, Assange was entering his fourth year locked in a tiny cell amongst convicted terrorists.” One wonders whether it is only feminists who should refrain from eating until Assange is free?

More from this author

The corruption of the feminist library

By Julie Bindel

Hen parties, make-up salons, hair dressers, maternity wards are all permissible places for women to hang out, but actual feminists meeting? Those women that refuse to back down when the patriarchal boot is on the collective neck? No chance.

Some of the intensity of this backlash is no doubt driven by jealousy — not just of us having lunch with the stupendous Rowling, but of how much we made each other laugh. Contrary to prejudicial stereotypes about feminists, there is no shortage of funny women in our midst. As can be seen in the countless photos taken at the lunch, we teased each other in the most irreverent way, such as deciding that Rowling was only 66% straight. I mean, come on: very few heterosexual feminists prioritise the bullying and debasement of lesbians by trans activists and other misogynists as she does.

When the photos were tweeted, to great merriment, I suddenly found myself accused of being some type of sexual predator, out to convert our Queen. In response, Rowling wrote: “Appalled to learn that @bindelj sexually harassed me by (checks notes) making me laugh while lunching. I’ve naturally consulted lawyers, but they say my case is likely to fail at trial due to a legal loophole known as ‘this is bullshit’. Devastated. Please send more fake concern.”

And yet for all that we laughed, it isn’t easy being on the receiving end of so much vitriol and hatred, no matter how much support, or wealth, or sisterhood you have. People seem to think that privileged women such as Rowling have no feelings, no ability to feel pain, and no concern for their safety. But this is sociopathic behaviour, sadistic even — laced with a desire to put women on the receiving end in a position where we cannot win.

Well, on that Sunday afternoon, with that group of women, and the friendship and solidarity in sisterhood in the air, we won. Trust me: we had the hangovers to prove it.

Many people, like Oliver Dowden, the chairman of the Conservative Party, think that the culture wars in Britain are between the woke Left and the conservative Right. This is only partially correct. They are also between the liberal-Left and the woke Left; they are also civil wars.

Dowden made a speech a couple of weeks ago at an American think-tank called the Heritage Foundation. It wasn’t exactly Churchill in Fulton, Missouri, but it made a splash. Dowden denounced woke ideology as a terrifying force: “a social media mob,” he said, “can cancel you merely because you have dared to challenge one of the Left’s fashionable nostrums.”

Dowden’s analysis of woke politics is slightly misplaced; and so too is the criticism of the speech made by the former MP and government minister David Gauke in the New Statesman. Gauke is wrong because, though he admits cancel culture is a problem, he sees it as a minor nuisance.

I can understand how: if you think it’s simply a battle between academics and conservative journalists, it can seem like a minor conflict. One that is only played out in the hyperactive transient world of social media and radio talk-in shows. But it is not just a clash between Scylla and Charybdis. It is also a family fight. And this is why the word ‘woke’ should be used.

It is now fashionable among a certain type of Left-liberal or centrist to say ‘woke’ is a meaningless term. It is certainly true that it is much abused. Some newspaper columnists relish going after ‘woke snowflakes’ with the zeal of indiscriminate big-game hunters. I can see why one would want to remove themselves from that. It’s all so vulgar, and disavowing the term ‘woke’ thus seems like a cleaner choice.

But there is no point denying that there are conflicts around the issues of gender, free speech, race and culture. And that these conflicts are not only waged by the Right-wing press, but are in fact found within many institutions largely staffed by liberal-Left people. The culture wars, which are often derided as fake and drummed up by the Right, are real. They are an extension of politics — and politics is by its very nature oppositional.

More from this author

The Godfather of Critical Race Theory

By Tomiwa Owolade

Woke also has a sharp Anglo-Saxon sting; it’s a name that sticks. “Social Justice Warriors” is too long and its acronymic version SJW is dull. Progressive is too loose and airy. Woke gets straight to the point, and is useful in conveying, in its aggressive consonantal force, the internecine nature of this conflict.

The transgender debate, for instance, is not a conflict between reactionaries and progressives. It is a battle between older liberal-Left women and younger progressive women; between older gay and lesbian radicals and younger ones. Mumsnet and the Observer have done more than conservative think tanks to highlight the tension between biological sex and gender identity. It is not lavishly funded conservative institutions but grassroots feminist organisations such as Woman’s Place UK which are at the forefront of the fight against gender-identity politics in Britain.

It may seem like an intergenerational conflict because older women care less about what people think of them than younger women. But there are many younger people who are privately sceptical about elements of the politics of social justice. The key word here is privately.

We tend to think this conflict is made up of Right-wing cranks and irate historians (and a group of inexplicable feminists!) against an online-savvy Left. But ask many people in the publishing industry about what they really think of J.K. Rowling, Kate Clanchy and sensitivity readers — and the obscuring effect of self-censorship becomes clear. Some of them will be happy to chat to you, over the phone or in a pub, and express their views. But it has to be off-the record.

Suggested article

How sensitivity readers corrupt literature

By Kate Clanchy

These people are Guardian readers. They hate the Tories. They support Black Lives Matter, and are gravely worried about climate change. But they are scared stiff about saying the treatment of J.K. Rowling was terrible, that Clanchy made a mistake in responding to a Goodreads comment on Twitter but her detractors have behaved terribly, and that the use of sensitivity readers is crude and patronising. This is what they believe, but they don’t want to lose their jobs.

People who say woke is meaningless are evasive about this intra-Left conflict. They point to people such as Robert Tombs and David Abulafia, who will gladly write columns for the Telegraph excoriating the woke Left. Tombs will (falsely) claim in the Times that Churchill was not a racist. But where are the academics who will argue that Churchill was a racist but also a great man? When is the Guardian going to publish that?

Such people do exist, but if they think any criticism of woke politics will put them in the same camp as people like Tombs, they’ll prefer to stew away quietly. Many of the same people who bemoan the divisive nature of the culture wars are doing absolutely nothing to make it more nuanced. Claiming that certain figures from the past who were racist were not in fact racist is an extreme view; but so is denying that some of these racist people should not be considered heroic or virtuous or praiseworthy in other respects.

More from this author

Antiracism won't save you

By Tomiwa Owolade

In English departments, many academics do not want to be labelled as racists, so they publicly acquiesce to calls to decolonise the curriculum, but many of them are, again, quietly sceptical. They value the principle of diversity; they also subscribe to a humanist approach to literature that affirms great books can’t be wholly reduced to politics. They love equality. But they also love pluralism and honest intellectual discussion.

They know these things should not conflict with each other — we can consider the politics of a text without viewing that text entirely through the lens of politics; we can value both diversity and frank intellectual debate. But they live in an atmosphere in which they are in conflict. And so they do nothing about it because they don’t want to face a backlash.

This is why saying and using ‘woke’ is important. It brings what is obscure into the open. It allows the debate to be had within the liberal-Left, where it needs to be had. It is clarifying.

But many (here, here, here, here, here, and here) argue that cancel culture doesn’t really exist. It’s just a Right-wing talking point. To which I would respond: how do you know? There is so much self-censorship going on that people are not being honest about what they believe about certain sensitive issues. They don’t have the wealth or power of J.K. Rowling; they are scared of losing their jobs. That is cancel culture.

Suggested article

The unbearable lightness of being cancelled

By Howard Jacobson

In another liberal-Left organisation, the Labour Party, the tensions are revealed by a poll last year which found that only 25% of Labour Party voters support defunding the police — one key policy of woke ideology. Even among 18-24 year olds, the wokest demographic, it is only 44%. When asked whether we should view society’s problems through the lens of white privilege, the poll also found that only 29% of Labour voters agreed. More than half think “woke practices” have gone too far.

Of course, people have complex views. One might support taking the knee, believe statues of certain slave traders like Edward Colston should be taken down, and believe that we should learn more about slavery and colonialism at school, but such people might still be critical of other aspects of woke ideology. This is why they would be reluctant to describe themselves as anti-woke. To do so might imply opposition to all those things. But they could also describe themselves as non-woke or woke-sceptical; the fact that wokeness can be ambiguous does not mean it is a meaningless term. It just means it can be ambiguous.

Wokeness has a family resemblance to other progressive ideologies — but it is also distinct. Many socialists are non-woke; their analysis is rooted in class politics rather than identity. I also think it’s lazy to simply describe wokeness as liberalism. It is often profoundly illiberal. If woke-deniers think the Right is often misusing the term, they should take ownership of it. Simply saying ‘woke’ is a meaningless term, without offering a more attractive alternative, is a form of evasion.

Suggested article

Inside the trans publishing purge

By Josephine Bartosch

One reason why this matters on the liberal-Left is because the vast majority of 18-24 year olds now back liberal-Left parties. There is an old adage that people become more conservative as they get older. But if the changes in people’s lives which lead them to become conservative, such as owning property and having kids, are becoming increasingly rare, then that transition to conservatism might not come to pass for many young people. This is why the battle between the woke Left and the non-woke or woke-sceptical Left is especially salient. It has repercussions for all of us.

Questions such as: what is a woman, how should we examine our past, how we should think about race in an increasingly diverse society, and how we should think about free speech and tolerance are all absolutely key for trying to make sense of the nature of public discourse today and in the future. They ultimately boil down to the question of who we are, and what we should do about it.

Since then, I have heard from hundreds of women and men who have been discriminated against and harassed at work for expressing the “gender critical” view that human beings cannot change sex, and that sex matters. Some cases, like mine, have become publicly known, but they are the tip of the iceberg. Many of the people who have endured complaints, and been subject to internal disciplinary processes, go unnoticed. As do those so afraid of losing their jobs that they remain anonymous when expressing their views online.

Despite this, the debate has gone mainstream in the last three years. Today, the gender debate can be heard in parliament, academia and the media, as well as on social media and in discussions between friends. There have been best-selling books on the subject and all manner of public figures — from Trevor Phillips and Tony Blair to Martina Navratilova and Tanni Grey-Thompson — have spoken up on the issue.

More people are speaking up about the need for clarity about sex, for safeguarding and women’s rights. They work in education, healthcare, in parliament and the media. Most of all, there are parents speaking up to their children’s schools.

I first started tweeting about the issue in 2018, back when the UK government was consulting on whether to reform the Gender Recognition Act to gender self-ID. My remarks were deemed so outrageous that the Center for Global Development (CGD) decided not to offer me further employment.

In 2019 a judge declared that my belief (that there are two sexes, that human beings can’t change sex, and that sex is important) did not count as a philosophical belief for the purposes of the Equality Act, that it was “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”.

The day after I lost my case JK Rowling tweeted about it, bringing me more public attention than I had bargained for. When my case became internationally newsworthy, lies were circulated about me, meant to discredit Rowling. Tweets and YouTube videos and even newspaper articles have said I “misgendered” or harassed a trans colleague. In fact, I had no trans colleagues, and I told CGD from the start that I would always treat people with respect and politeness in any professional situation.

In June 2020, I won an appeal to overturn the initial judgment. The President of the Employment Appeal Tribunal determined that my ordinary belief about male and female people, which I share with the vast majority of people in the world, is not only in line with the UK legal definition of the sexes, but also “worthy of respect in a democratic society”. This meant I can continue my discrimination case against my ex-employer. It also means that other people can now seek legal redress if they are harassed or discriminated against, at work or as a service user, for believing that men are male and women are female. If people face workplace harassment for speaking up on this issue, they can point to the precedent of “Forstater”.

More from this author

The transgender lobby wants to rewrite the law

By Maya Forstater

Stonewall’s strategy of “no debate” on its push for gender self-ID has backfired. The unreasonable and unrelenting attacks on people as obviously calm and compassionate as Professor Kathleen Stock and JK Rowling have led more people to look again at the policies being promoted in the name of “trans inclusion”, which chip away at areas of life formerly designated female-only.

My case will be back in the Employment Tribunal starting on 7 March, three years to the day from when I lost my job. It has been a long, slow process to clear my name. And it is vital that I win this final stage — not just so I get justice, but also to demonstrate to employers that these rights don’t just exist on paper. You cannot disregard the usual frameworks of non-discrimination and respect for everyone’s human rights, just because someone points a finger and whispers “transphobe”. And employers should stop doing the bidding of organisations like Stonewall that tell them to do so.

By standing up to the gender bullies in whatever way we can, we are breaking through the culture of fear. My case and others have shone a light on areas of institutional capture. Harry Miller challenged the College of Policing over Humberside Police Force’s heavy-handed response to a complaint about his comical tweets. Keira Bell, a young detransitioned woman, brought a case against the NHS Tavistock gender-identity clinic challenging the experimental medical treatments being given to gender non-conforming children. Other cases are coming, most notably that of Allison Bailey, a barrister and a lesbian who is suing Stonewall, the influential LGBTQIA+ organisation, for colluding in a witch-hunt against her by her legal chambers.

Suggested reading

Why I stopped being a good girl

By Hadley Freeman

All these voices and so many others have brought the debate out into the open. As a result of that debate, the UK government ditched the proposal for gender self-ID (although Scotland is still planning to go ahead), and has commissioned an independent review of children’s gender-identity services. The Equality and Human Rights Commission, the UK’s human rights law watchdog, intervened in my case to say that my belief is indeed protected. And it has gone on to change its position on gender self-ID laws.

If it wasn’t obvious before that my belief is “worthy of respect in a democratic society”, it is now.

One of the worst things about being a claimant in an employment tribunal is how it isolates you. People who know you professionally keep their distance. They imagine I might have done something awful to lead CGD to argue that I engaged in speech so offensive that it “causes harm to trans people, and therefore could not be protected under the Equality Act”. And I could not clear my name. My tribunal is the first chance for the full truth to be heard.

Suggested reading

The SNP won't silence women

By Sarah Pedersen

It is perhaps worth noting that the organisation I worked for is the European subsidiary of a parent organisation based in Washington DC. The complaints by people who read my tweets came from the US. The consultants who investigated me were from the US, and so were the decision makers who decided to let me go.

Radical gender ideology arose in the campuses of elite North American universities and has spread to the UK, and other countries. This is not a positive cultural import. The idea of replacing sex with “gender identity” is institutional kryptonite, corrupting organisations, preventing people from speaking truthfully and recording data accurately. It turns organisations away from their principles, in ways that particularly harm women and children, even while allowing those organisations to wave a superficial flag of “inclusion”. This is an American import we should reject. We would be better off without it.

For example, when I was 10, I wore a Santa jumper to school. “You can’t wear Santa, you’re Jewish! Do you believe Jesus was born on Christmas?” a girl in my class said to me. I didn’t really know what she was talking about, but I knew what she wanted me to say, so I said it: “Yes, Jesus was born on Christmas.” She walked away, satisfied, and I felt a little like I’d given something away, but I was mainly relieved I’d avoided an argument.

And that’s how things continued for me, until 2014, when everything changed.

I was reading the New Yorker one evening and came across an article with the headline “What is a Woman?”. It was, according to the standfirst, about “the dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism”, a subject about which I knew nothing. I read it, vaguely interested in the social shift that meant being “transgender” no longer refers to someone who has undergone a sex change operation, but is now “how someone sees themselves”, as the writer Michelle Goldberg put it. This meant, Goldberg continued, that women-only spaces were increasingly changing to women-and-transwomen spaces, even if those transwomen still had male bodies — and to query this risked accusations of bigotry.

What really interested me was how quickly institutions were falling into line with this new ideology: venues cancelled talks if a radical feminist was on the bill; all-female bands pulled out of women-only festivals for fear of looking transphobic. How strange, I thought, that those with authority capitulate to the obviously misogynistic demands of a few extreme voices. Oh well, that’s just America — obviously it will never happen in the UK.

Oh, the innocence of eight years ago! Today, gender ideology — the belief that who a person feels they are is more important than the material reality of their body — is firmly in the ascendent. Activists like to claim that the only people who have a problem with this are “Right-wing bigots”, because it keeps things simple to suggest that this is a good (gender ideology) versus bad (Right-wing bigots) issue.

Yet I know a lot of non-Right-wing, non-bigots who are extremely angry at how things have shifted. My friendship group consists mainly of thirty-something to fifty-something progressive women, all, like me, lifelong Labour, or Liberal Democrat, or Green voters, all teachers, or civil servants, or writers, or lawyers. Most are not on Twitter, or TikTok, or any Mumsnet message boards. But when we meet up these days, they talk about Lia Thomas, the Ivy League swimmer who recently transitioned and is allowed to compete against female swimmers and is duly smashing women’s swimming records.

They talk about JK Rowling, vilified for saying that women — not people — menstruate and calling for single-sex spaces to be preserved. They talk about Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor, who had to leave her job at Sussex University due to ongoing harassment from gender activists. They talk about political parties which explicitly describe women’s sex-based rights as transphobic, including the Green Party and the SNP. They talk about politicians who say things so stupid about gender it’s impossible to believe that they truly believe what they are saying, from Dawn Butler’s claim that “a child is born without a sex”, to Layla Moran’s insistence that she doesn’t care about a person’s sex because she can see “their soul”, to Keir Starmer’s stammering insistence that it’s wrong to say “only women have a cervix”.

You can — and many do — dismiss these angry women as irrelevant middle-aged mums, or just a bunch of Karens, but they do not fit into the “Right-wing bigot” pigeonhole, however much gender ideologues try to squash them in. As a result, many on the Left would prefer that this debate about gender, with older feminists on one side and gender ideologues on the other, was not happening at all, because it doesn’t fit into the good versus bad dichotomy with which the Left frames the world. So they tell themselves that this is a “niche” issue and “normal women” (ie, women not on Twitter or Mumsnet) don’t know or care about it.

Suggested watching

Why I stopped being a good girl

By Sally Chatterton

Let me disabuse them of both of those notions: they do and they do. The threats, the abuse, the no-platforming of gender-critical feminists: despite the activists’ best efforts to make all of this vanish, none of it has worked. This is the issue that readers and friends want most to talk to me about, albeit only, they say, with no small amount of frustration, in private.

It did not – and I cannot stress this enough – have to be this way. In 2016, Maria Miller, then the chair of the women and equalities committee, produced a report that suggested switching gender should just be a matter of “self-identification”. This statutory declaration would replace the previous gender recognition process, which involved living in one’s chosen gender for two years, being diagnosed with gender dysphoria and being questioned by a panel.

Yet it is a pretty basic fact that male bodies are bigger and stronger than female ones, which is why sex-based rights exist in the first place. So how, I wondered, would self-ID work in practice? Would a person born male now be able to compete against women in sport, or be incarcerated with female prisoners? I assumed the government had thought about this. I assumed wrongly.

In a 2017 interview with The Times, Miller was unable to answer the most basic questions about how her proposals would affect women, which seemed weird to me, because surely you’d think about women when massively overhauling women’s rights? If Miller had given this even a moment’s thought, and acknowledged that women and transgender people’s rights needed to be balanced, rather than selling out the former to appease gender ideologues, it seems highly likely to me that the debate would never have become as fraught as it is. Anyway, after four years of anguished discussions, Miller’s reforms got kicked into the long grass in 2020, although they are still scheduled to go forward in Scotland, backed by the SNP and Greens.

Many transgender people have said how much they have hated being the subjects of political and online debate over the past five or so years, and who can blame them? Yet this issue is not just about them. Debates about gender rights are also debates about women’s rights, because activists are asking, essentially, for the abolition of women’s sex-based rights. This made and makes no sense to me, not because I think that trans women are terrible people, but because women’s sex-based rights exist for a reason.

Suggested reading

Raquel Rosario Sánchez won't be silenced

By Joan Smith

I started having tentative discussions about this with other progressive journalists, but I was invariably the only one at the table who believed (or was willing to say out loud) that there is a clear clash between gender-based rights and women’s rights. When I said to one journalist that women need women-only spaces, he replied, “So you’re defending segregation?” Another time, when I said it was ridiculous to make prisons mixed-sex, someone I consider a friend said, “You sound like a homophobe in the Eighties saying you wouldn’t let your kids have a gay teacher.” Someone else told me I sounded like a “bigoted radical feminist” and I thought, “I used to be a deputy fashion editor, so if I’m now radical then the Left really is in trouble.” Another one said that by arguing for women’s sex-based rights I was beating down on “the most oppressed minority in Britain”, i.e., transgender people.

I have no doubt that transgender people suffer horrific bigotry in this country and everywhere. But when I found the statistics showed one trans person is tragically, killed a year in the UK, but two women are killed a week in England and Wales, I was accused of engaging in “the victim Olympics”. People who claimed to care ever so deeply about women’s physical safety during the MeToo movement now sneered at any woman who expressed doubt about sharing private spaces with male-bodied people. The most obvious example here was JK Rowling, who wrote about how her experiences with domestic violence informed her views, an inconvenient truth her critics conveniently ignored. Women are raised to fear male strength, and with very good reason. And now we’re called bigots for doing so.

For the first time in my 20-plus years of being a liberal journalist, I felt completely isolated. I knew I could make my life easier if I just reverted to being the good girl and shut up. “Be kind,” women were told by gender ideologues: be good girls, don’t ask questions, just nod and say what we tell you to say. You don’t want to be mean, do you? But how can you be a writer and not write your doubts about something so important? How can you be a journalist and not ask questions? Occasionally a professional peer would send a text saying that they agreed with me, but they couldn’t say so publicly because their editor wouldn’t like it, or their teenage kids would shout at them, or it was just too stressful.

So I questioned myself. Of course I did. Would my children be ashamed of me in twenty, ten, five years time? “Am I the baddie here?” I asked myself. But I just couldn’t make it square up: how can feelings (gender identity) always take precedence over material reality (biological sex)? Trying to convince myself that I was wrong and the gender ideologues were right was like trying to convince myself that one plus one equals a unicorn. How can you shut your eyes to your own experience and say something that makes no sense? Apparently some people can, but I could not.

I understand why some people see parallels between the modern transgender movement and the gay rights struggle. Like many gay people, trans people experience terrible marginalisation and discrimination, and some are rejected by their families, and that is tragic. Like gay people, they have been cruelly vilified in the Right-wing press (which is partly why the Left-wing media is then so loathe to raise any questions about the transgender movement. They don’t want to look like the evil Tories, right?). But there are other ways to see this situation, too.

Suggested reading

The truth about trans murders

By Tish Still

It felt at times like men’s rights activism as a religion. Whenever I or a female colleague dared to voice our doubts about gender ideology, we were pilloried; whenever a male colleague did, he was given a free pass. It was, in the vast, vast main, women who were condemned as bigots, all because they didn’t believe the right things, because they were trying to defend their legal rights. Left-wing men — both in person and online — told me that unless I repeated the mantra “trans women are women”, I was a bigot. It reminded me of that time in school when I was questioned about Jesus to prove my worthiness to wear a jumper.

At the same time as all this was going on, Labour’s seemingly never-ending anti-Semitism scandals were unfolding. Everyone was being urged to listen to those with “lived experience”, and yet non-Jewish people on the Left were telling British Jews that they knew better than them what anti-Semitism was. Now many of those same men were telling me that they knew better than me what a woman was. So this time I didn’t give up a part of myself. Instead, I felt real anger, and I wrote an article in which I told them to get lost. This provoked a huge backlash on Twitter, and no, it wasn’t pleasant. But it was definitely preferable to staying silent just because I was scared.

Other people, however, did not react like that. It was astonishing to me how quickly universities, publishing houses, NHS services, political parties, newspapers and TV networks capitulated to the gender ideologues, who were often not even trans themselves. Mainstream newspapers were suddenly using ideological terms like “cis”, a term which endorses the highly dubious belief that we all have an innate gender identity, and “top surgery”, a tidy euphemism for an elective double mastectomy. NHS services would talk about “cervix havers”, “chest feeding” and “pregnant people” (although prostate-havers were, notably, still men). ITV made a much-publicised drama, Butterfly, about a little boy who decides he’s a girl because he likes to wear make-up and jewellery, because clearly a boy playing with make up needs some kind of medical intervention — and what else is a girl but jewellery and lipstick?

Suggested reading

Kathleen Stock: I won't be silenced

By Julie Bindel

Many of the people demanding these institutional shifts were and are not transgender themselves. They are bullies who set themselves up as moral arbiters, using self-righteous hysteria and factually questionable claims to demand censorship, instilling fear that anyone caught engaging in wrongspeak or even wrongthink will be publicly shamed and professionally destroyed. Bullies who insist they need to reshape women’s rights entirely, and then accuse any woman who even wants to discuss this of being hateful, stupid and dangerous. I have seen some people refer to gender-critical feminists as bullies, but I have never seen a gender-critical feminist call for writers to be no-platformed, words to be banned, books to be pulped, or articles to be deleted from the web. Gender activists do all of that as a matter of routine.

Contrary to what these bullies have claimed, gender-critical feminists do not hate trans people. I certainly feel no anger or animosity towards trans people. The only feeling I have towards them is compassion. Not to the point where I’m willing to give up all of women’s sex-based rights, no. But I do know I can only imagine the trauma and pain they have endured in their lives. I also know that so many of the arguments that are happening in their name are not ones that they wish for at all; they are conducted largely by provocateurs who are just burnishing their online brands.

No, my anger is directed at the cowardly institutions that have allowed themselves to be bullied by a tiny misogynistic online minority instead of maintaining even a shadow of a backbone and doing what they know is right. Bristol University, for one, which is currently being sued by a young Dominican woman, Raquel Rosario-Sanchez, on the grounds of sex discrimination and negligence. Rosario-Sanchez came to Bristol to do a PhD on the male exploitation of prostitutes, but because she chaired an event with the feminist group, Woman’s Place UK, trans activists bullied and intimidated her.

She follows in the now extremely established lineage of women like Kathleen Stock, Maya Forstater, Allison Bailey, Rosie Kay — all women who have suffered huge professional setbacks and personal upheaval simply for believing that biological sex is the defining factor in women’s oppression. Do their employers think they’re wrong? Do they really think that something called gender identity, which I’m guessing most of them had never even heard of until six years ago, is the most important quality to a person, and any woman who doubts this must be shunned from society? Or do they just wish to be on The Right Side of History?

Suggested reading

For me, self-identification was a con

By Mary Harrington

That’s a phrase I’ve heard often over the past few years. An editor said it to a friend of mine when she wanted to look at the effect of puberty blockers on gender dysphoric children (“I know, I know, but we want to be on the right side of history…”), and a US magazine editor said it to me when I asked if I could interview Martina Navratilova about her views on trans athletes: “I know what you’re saying, and I’m on your side, really I am. But you have to wonder what the right side of history is,” he said. It’s a concern that’s entirely based on vanity, because it’s about wanting to look good, to be seen as the good guy, polishing one’s future legacy. It’s also a way of abdicating responsibility for one’s choices: I’m not making this decision because it’s what I think – it’s what the future thinks!

And then there’s Twitter. When I wanted to write for a magazine about the vilification of JK Rowling, I was told no, because it would cause “too much of a Twitter storm”. A friend wanted to put together a book of collected gender-critical essays, but an editor told her “the Twitter kickback would be too strong, and it wouldn’t get past the sensitivity readers anyway”. It amazes me how much power some people give to Twitter, because as someone who has been the object of several Twitter storms in my time, I’ll let you in on a little secret: Twitter means nothing, unless you give it the power to mean something. People should really stop giving Twitter so much power, because it’s making them bad at their jobs.

I’m lucky — I haven’t lost my job because I believe something that everyone believed up to five years ago, and most people still believe now. (Gender activists love to produce sweeping surveys which they insist prove most people support trans rights. When people are questioned about the rights of trans people who have not had gender reassignment surgery, or dig into the specifics of sport and prisons, public opinion, unsurprisingly, changes.) I did, however, stop writing my column. I was tired of being seen as the Phyllis Schlafly of The Guardian.

I’m currently writing a book about anorexia. Multiple doctors have confirmed to me what I already suspected, which is that there are obvious parallels between what gender dysphoric teenage girls say today — about their hatred of their body, their fear of sexualisation, their assumptions about what being a woman means — and what I said while in hospital as a teenager.

This is a fact, and an important one about adolescent mental health, and yet when other people have tried to make similar points in print, they have come up against enormous barriers. Abigail Shrier’s book, Irreversible Damage, which looked at the disproportionate rise in numbers of teenage girls seeking gender transition, was ignored by progressive newspapers and magazines, even though it sold well. A US supermarket stopped stocking it after protests by activists. The deputy director for transgender justice at the ACLU, which still claims to be a free speech organisation, said that suppressing Shrier’s book was “100% a hill I would die on”.

Suggested reading

Why I had to leave The Guardian

By Suzanne Moore

Repeatedly, women who write about this tell me they are subjected to impossible edits: pleas for balance, softened language, a more neutral tone, dissenting voices, more equivocation so as to render their original argument into meaningless slurry — everything editors do to a piece when, really, they would rather spike it and save themselves the bother. It doesn’t matter how many facts you have, what matters are the feelings.

I don’t discount feelings. Feelings are important. But it’s interesting whose feelings matter. Andrea Long Chu, a trans woman, wrote in her 2017 memoir that the “barest essentials” of “femaleness” is “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eye”. How did that get past the now ubiquitous sensitivity readers? It certainly didn’t hurt the writer’s career, who continues to get very high-profile commissions, whereas I personally know women who have lost their jobs for saying that the barest essentials of their femaleness was their biology. Or how about this line from a recently published memoir by Grace Lavery: when describing how hormone treatment has affected her body, she writes that her penis felt “as though I were laying my own miscarried foetus across my hand”.

I had a miscarriage. Two, actually. And so has almost every woman I know who has been pregnant. I wonder if anyone at that publishing company thought how we might feel, seeing our failed pregnancies compared to a flaccid penis? I’m guessing none, and fair enough, because I actually don’t think fear of offence is a reasonable excuse not to publish something. The double standards are ludicrous: you can now say any old garbage about women, but anything that even questions gender ideology will be anxiously second-guessed and overly edited into oblivion, no matter how many facts and even genuine feelings are behind it.

Someone described this to me recently as “a period of over-correction”, and I get that. For so long, transgender people were underrepresented, mocked and harassed, and now it’s their moment to have their say, and fair enough. But this should not be an either/or situation: both women and trans people should be able to speak out equally and honestly in progressive spheres. Instead, I see Left-wing feminist writers being funnelled towards Right-wing publications, simply because Left-wing ones are too anxious to stay on The Right Side of History to publish them. This makes it easier for the Left-wing bullies to discredit them, but it does not make what they’re saying any less true.

Recently, Mumsnet hosted a live discussion with Stella Creasy and Caroline Nokes about women and mothers in politics. When the majority of the questions were about gender and what Creasy and Nokes think a woman is, the journalist Marie Le Conte called the Mumsnetters “obsessive” and “radicalised”. There were many problems facing women today, she wrote, but instead of working together on low rape convictions and workplace discrimination, feminists were arguing over this one issue.

Suggested reading

My body will never be erased

By Rosie Kay

Le Conte is right, of course: these are things women should be focusing on, because they affect women. But how can women focus on them if politicians won’t even say what a woman is anymore? If sex and gender are being blurred together, how can we discuss who’s being discriminated against and why? In the workplace, a woman might be sacked because, say, she got pregnant, which is sex discrimination. A trans woman might be sacked because of transphobia. These are very different issues, and while inclusion is a laudable aim, it can’t come at the cost of clarity and efficacy.

It is not bigoted to say these things. And yet, there was a period, about three years ago, when I honestly thought about quitting my job. I felt so hated for saying things — things that are scientifically, biologically and factually true — and so unsupported by people who I know secretly agree with me but are too scared to say so out loud that I nearly left journalism. Well, I didn’t. Instead, I decided to stop being so frustrated by it all, and to stop taking what is going on in the progressive media circles and institutions so personally. For so long, I defined myself as a Left-wing journalist, but political categories are watery these days, and I’m OK with feeling out of step from so many people I once thought of as my side. I know they see things differently from me and I fully support their right to express their views; that feeling, I know all too well, is not mutual.

I don’t feel like I’ve become radicalised, because I don’t think anything I didn’t already think six years ago. I do, however, feel much better about myself for not just thinking it but saying it. I have learned that there is something worse than people telling me I’m a bad person, and that is allowing bullies to reframe the world, to dictate what we can all think and to define my reality. They might have triumphed over some institutions, but they haven’t triumphed over me. It turns out life is much better when you’re no longer the good girl.

***

Order your copy of UnHerd’s first print edition here. 

The police eventually turned up and moved us on, but not before we had made our point and incited curiosity and solidarity from passers-by. Our demonstration was even reported in the Yorkshire Evening Post. Our message had been heard.

That sort of in-your-face feminism was — alas —  a bit sidelined by the internet. Along came the rise of keyboard activism, whose warriors prioritise sending out petitions and messages of condemnation on Twitter over taking to the streets alongside their sisters. Partly that’s convenience but partly it’s because the internet is where a lot of the violence is incited and savage verbal attacks take place.

Take the particularly vicious campaign against Milli Hill. Last November, Hill, founder of the Positive Birth Movement and the of bestselling books including Give Birth Like a Feminist, was the victim of an online pile on when she took issue with the phrase “birthing people”. She wrote: “It is women who are seen as the ‘fragile sex’ etc, and obstetric violence is violence against women. Let’s not forget who the oppressed are here and why.”

On they piled. Slowly at first, but then harder and faster: “anti-LGBTQ”, “transphobic”, “toxic” “dangerous”… And people she had worked with dropped her. So she laid low for 8 months and then wrote a blog about her appalling experience.

At which point it all kicked off again. One trans activist tweeted at Hill: “Milli, you obviously haven’t learned from the response JK Rowling got from her post. You aren’t incorrect that obstetric violence is sex-based. But how difficult is it to acknowledge that not everyone who is capable of giving birth, identifies with the female or woman label?”

Rowling shot off a blinder in support:

Judging by the tsunami of supportive emails and letters I've received, if women learned anything from the response to my post it wasn't that they should sit down and shut up. Solidarity to the brave and fabulous @millihill (and I love your books, by the way!) pic.twitter.com/dLdsYR73Qd

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) July 15, 2021

The response from women everywhere was amazing. As I write, the tweet has been ‘liked’ more than 24,000 times.

Rowling’s refusal to be cowed by the bullies is giving strength to other women to stand up and speak out. Rowling keeps going because she knows that thousands upon thousands of women have her back.

This feels like a significant moment. Feminists are rising up.

And as this brilliant sisterly solidarity plays out out on the internet, it’s filtering out on to the streets again. More and more women are putting down the keyboard and picking up the loudhailer — some for the first time.

Earlier this week, more than 300 women and a smattering of men gathered at Glasgow Green in protest at the ongoing case against Marion Millar. The Scottish accountant was arrested, interrogated and charged under the Communications Act for sending six tweets in 2019 which were deemed to be offensive. One tweet included a photograph of a bow of ribbons in the green, white and purple colours of the Suffragettes, tied around a tree. According to the complainant(s), the ribbons represented a noose. For her crime, Millar faces six months in prison, away from her young family.

Even though the hearing was postponed, the protest went ahead, with supporters congregating on the green, waving banners and placards reading, “#WomenWontWheesht” (wheesht is a Scottish colloquialism meaning ‘shut up’) a hashtag that has come to symbolise the feminist refusal to be silenced.

They chanted, sang, and made a fuss. It was excellently old school. And they were full-throated in outrage for police and prosecutors targeting women for supposed “hate crime” when convictions for rape and male violence are at an all-time low.

For as long as there has been male violence and oppression, women have protested. The very first women-only direct action on record was in Manchester in 1905. Christabel Pankhurst and millworker, Annie Kenney, disrupted speeches by prominent Liberals Winston Churchill and Sir Edward Grey, asking where the men stood with regards to women’s political rights.

In November 1910, suffragettes stormed the House of Commons to protest against the hostility of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith to women’s voting rights. The police responded by attacking the women with truncheons, and many were beaten, sexually assaulted and humiliated.

Thus was the women’s case proven. The women hit back and rampaged through Westminster smashing windows and attacking property. They were arrested, but this particular direct action went down in history.

Feminists threw flour bombs at the Miss World competition in London in 1970; invaded the Ideal Home exhibition in protest of lesbians having their children removed by the state in the 1980s; and spray painted buildings and stormed churches during sermons in the campaign to criminalise rape in marriage.

It is only visible action that will shame governments and other state agencies into change. Social media could never replace standing outside a court building and shouting our demands in full view of the public. That’s why I’ve helped organise hundreds of public demonstrations across the UK against domestic abuse and injustice towards women.

Suggested reading

The police have a woman problem

By Sarah Ditum

It’s important we are heard because there is currently a concerted effort from both the Left and the Right to silence us: the Left won’t let women talk about their sex-based rights; the Right is stripping resources from the places were abused women find shelter. And something is shifting. Women are getting noisier. Women are making a stand. Just look at the masses who turned out to express their anger and grief over the Sarah Everard murder.

And those who stand up inspire others to do the same. Just like Milly Hill, who told me: “Other women made me feel braver, and I wanted to in turn help other women to feel braver.” And JK, too, standing up to the bullies and facing down the death threats.

I have interviewed 50 young women over the course of two years for my forthcoming book on feminism, in order to explore cross generational understanding and cooperation, which recently has been lacking between young feminists and the Second Wave, like me.

Suggested reading

Why are so many women being killed?

By Julie Bindel

But each and every interviewee told me a similar story – that they are rising up against the liberal notion that everything bad that happens to them is “empowering”. They are getting angry about the global sex trade, about forced marriage, FGM, and daily sexual harassment. That is why more and more younger women are taking to the streets – to reclaim them.

Like Marion Millar and her supporters, feminists young and old will not be intimidated into silence or capitulation. It is the antithesis of our movement. Feminism exists because women have been under the cosh patriarchy for centuries. My favourite chant, constantly heard at feminist rallies is, “Women’s tradition: Struggle not submission.”

I will never forget the exhilaration of my early public protests and direct actions. I was even held in a police station on one occasion, having been accused of public order offences. I was finally released without charge the following morning, and I recall feeling the sweet sense of freedom. I want all women and girls to feel that freedom, but every hour of every day.

Opening, reading and sorting the fan mail postbag for Coronation Street at Granada Television was part of my fairly lowly first job in television back in 1997. A novice, I was taken aback at the consistently boiling tone and curious preoccupations of our correspondents. “Have we got a problem?” I asked my boss, wafting a particularly choice collection of scrawled rage under her nose, after the show had recently taken a tumble in the ratings. But she, an old hand, just laughed.

“If a viewer has gone to all the trouble of sitting down to write a letter, buying a stamp and an envelope, and popping it in the pillar box, all for the pleasure of telling you they’re going to stop watching your show — well, then they’re so highly motivated they will never stop watching your show,” she chuckled. “They are fandom. They are the last people we should be paying attention to!”

Back then the internet was in its nascency, only beginning to transition from a hobby into an integrated part of everyday life. It is now a medium so ubiquitous we hardly even think about it, and those born under its shadow probably almost never do. And so my boss’s valuable insight has been lost.

Everything, thanks to the internet, now has a fandom; not just TV shows and pop stars but public institutions, political parties, nations. The fan clubs of old where you sent off for a sticker and a poster are no more. Fandoms are mini-communities, groups of people who don’t just like or enjoy something but who love it, and love it hard.

And in some cases, love in a way so obsessive it’s barely distinguishable from hate. So while almost everybody loves the Beatles, Beatles fandom can tell you exactly where the Beatles went wrong, why, and how they should actually have gone about things.

Fandoms are often very, very mad and sometimes very, very bad. Taking them seriously is ill-advised. Pandering to them is almost always disastrous. And as common culture has fragmented — thanks to audience shrinkage and ever more niche content — the noisy obsessives of fandom have become louder, with some serious consequences, and not just for pop culture. Look at the Labour Party — a mass working-class unionised movement that has been turned upside down by catering to a loud rump of headbangers. It’s not a political party, it’s fandom.

How has this happened? Back to Granada, and those falling ratings. I’ll always remember the long faces and numb horror in the office when Coronation Street dipped below 13 million viewers one night. A significant rung had been slipped, and ITV executives and advertisers were not happy.

Today Coronation Street is still ITV’s big strong ratings grabber. Last Monday it got 5.1 million viewers.

What has happened is that the media landscape has expanded, and then — in the late 2010s — exploded. Far fewer people are watching the same things, and fewer still are watching them at the same time. And yet paradoxically this dwindling has seen a massive increase in the attention paid to the unrepresentative complainers.

The immediacy of the medium of complaint can blind us to these tiny numbers. Your heart will often sink, and you may feel a “what is the world coming to?” twinge in the soul, when you see, for example, a particularly stupid tweet with 30,000 likes. It’s easy to forget that this is a hugely unrepresentative global platform, and that those 30,000 — the size of the population of Chichester — might well be the only people in the world who agree with it.

More from this author

We are all prisoners of groupthink

By Gareth Roberts

But in today’s public sphere even smaller numbers have a disproportionate effect. Almost every day in the tabloids you’ll see how “eagle eyed fans took to Twitter” about a TV show. Often all it takes is a couple salty tweets to confect a news story. Ofcom can be “deluged” by “fury” after about 40 complaints.

Over the 20th century we lost a community-based folk culture; the folk songs and myths blasted away by mass technology, religious observance in sharp decline — but at least we had a kind of substitute. We were more often on the same page. Now, we consume in silos — and silos have therefore become fashionable.

Even the megastars of the recent past, Bowie or Elton John, are retooled to appear boutique. The movie Bohemian Rhapsody eulogises the band Queen — who have sold 300 million albums worldwide — as “misfits and outcasts” who “don’t belong”, playing to an audience of the same. At Wembley Stadium.

Queen were like an institution, attracting — like Coronation Street — a huge cross-section of the population. Few things can claim that today, and the smaller that audiences become, the more that those audiences become a febrile mob that can go from obsessive love to hate and back again in seconds.

These are communities that are formed ad hoc around shared, often eccentric, interests; without the scrutiny and self-doubt that leaven most shared endeavours they quickly, inevitably, become little fiefdoms of the ultra-committed. So the loudest, most intemperate, most present voices are amplified and now, crucially, are catered to, as if they were important. Huge corporations quake in fear from tiny numbers of tweets, again sometimes just one — witness Innocent smoothies and Kiva recently jumping like scalded cats after solitary tweets from activists complaining about them for merely following a pensioner labelled as “transphobic”.

More from this author

Morrissey: lunatic seer of the modern world

By Gareth Roberts

Back to the 90s again. The first internet communities — the social media of their day — were the “rec.arts” news groups that formed around shared hobbies and fixations. Looking back, they served as an early warning system, with spats, threats, temper tantrums, sendings to Coventry and castings out into the wilderness. But then at least there was a real world to judge this against, to escape back to.

Today the world is one big newsgroup — rec.arts-reality.com. The real-world social tics that stop polarised factions forming just aren’t present in these mediums. Most people, in the flesh, will want to agree around some kind of careful thought and politeness simply to make any dialogue possible. Remove niceties and things get nasty.

Only the loudest screams are heard and so now the strangest and most extreme views held by tiny numbers of people — that biological sex is not real, that the police should be abolished, that a person’s skin colour makes them irredeemably wicked — are rewarded, reinforced, even protected from being questioned or mocked.

This politics-as-fandom has inevitably started to spill out into the real world. Antifa and the storming of the Capitol are cosplay gone wild in the streets. The Twitter-popular fandoming of the Labour Party around Jeremy Corbyn had predictably ruinous results as it slammed into the real world of the British electorate. The zealotry of the EU’s Twitter “FBPE” fandom led the Remainer faction in Parliament to overestimate their hand and blow their chance of a softer Brexit.

In a strange reversal, as politics becomes more like fandom, the fandoms of old have started to behave like political actors. Star Wars fans lobby Disney as if they were a campaign group, as we saw with the recent dismissal of the actor Gina Carano. Fans of K-pop outfit BTS buy out a Trump rally to protest in support of Black Lives Matter. The poor folk band Hanson are forced into making a statement on the issue of which everyone must have an opinion (and the correct opinion) by their demented fans. Ditto with actor Chris Pratt.

And, of course, there is J.K. Rowling.

Suggested reading

Liberals rarely defend liberalism

By Peter Franklin

Arthur Miller famously described the ideal of a good newspaper as “a nation talking to itself”. A common culture, a still centre, should be the cardinal purpose of the BBC. Instead the BBC, like many of its commercial rivals, has run scared, adopting and amplifying the craziest voices because those people are most likely to generate the small number of clicks that seem big in a microcosm.

We desperately need to reaffirm a shared order of meaning. The nerds and noisy complainers have to be put back in their box — I can confirm, as a member of the nerd community, that we were happier there. The special discipline of producing mass popular culture that freely and genuinely reflects its whole audience is being lost, and without it we are obsessing about the oddest things. It’s like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

Let’s think in big numbers, in commonality, and forget fandom. Thirteen million cheers for the lowest common denominator.

It should be stressed that cancel culture is not the exclusive preserve of the woke Left. Performative offence-taking is something that can be engaged in by persons of just about any ideological persuasion.

However, if you see a reasoned complaint about cancel culture, then it’s probably coming from a conservative or libertarian point of view. On the other side of the ‘culture war’, liberals have rather less to say about this matter.

Further reading

How US journalism lost its spine

By Michael Tracey

Which is odd, because in many ways they have more to lose. While conservatives are already alienated from modernity, and libertarians dream of a future that hasn’t happened yet, liberals are living in the world that they built. Our cultural infrastructure may have roots in pre-modernity, but today most of it is run by liberals — and has been for decades. It’s not called liberal democracy for nothing.

As radicals exploit the crisis-filled moment to continue their march through the institutions, it is liberal values that are under attack — like free speech, fairness, equality and reason.

So why aren’t the partisans of the Enlightenment rallying against the statue topplers — and the other manifestations of cancel culture? The liberal grandees of the commentariat seem remarkably unalarmed by recent events. Some of them, like Matthew Parris, in a recent piece for The Spectator, emphasise the upside.

*

At this point I should point to some honourable exceptions. For instance, impeccably liberal writers like Janice Turner of The Times who speak out against the “tiny, intolerant minority” that “is dictating public policy which the vast majority of us abhor”:

“Where will the righteous anger train stop next? When will we know that ‘progress’ is finally achieved? When every member of every public body utters the required line? When every associate of JK Rowling is shamed? When every corporation is scared into compliance?”

Turner isn’t the only one. There are others, including some who aren’t just liberal but firmly on the Left, who have taken a stand. However, they often pay a price for doing so — becoming othered and isolated from the bien pensant mainstream. The feminists smeared as ‘TERFs’, for instance. Or the defenders of academic freedom associated with Quillette magazine. Or the Remain supporters, like Caroline Flint, who resisted the undemocratic attempt to overturn the referendum result.

Though these all continue to believe the things that placed them firmly in the non-conservative camp, they’ve become defined by their dissent. That’s not because liberalism and wokeness are the same thing (they aren’t), but because liberals who expose the differences find that their fellow liberals refuse to stand with them. It’s not that such solidarity would require full agreement, just a defence of the right to disagree.

So why the passivity? It maybe that mainstream liberals perceive the woke threat to be an exaggeration — perhaps an outright invention of the populist Right. If the calling-out of bigotry does occasionally tip over into cancel culture then any excess is the work of irrelevant fringe. And, anyway, where’s the harm? Will democracy be irreparably damaged if the likes of Katie Hopkins are kicked off Twitter?

Except that cancel culture goes so much further than any of that. This issue is about what is happening within mainstream institutions — and what is being done to people with mainstream views.

Look at what happened to James Bennet, who was, until recently, a well-regarded comment editor at the New York Times. He was forced out after internal ructions a few weeks ago. The controversy was over the paper’s publication of  an op-ed by Tom Cotton, a Republican Senator. It happened at the height of the unrest in several American cities — and Cotton argued for “an overwhelming show of force” to restore order. It was a hawkish piece, but one that drew a distinction between a “majority who seek to protest peacefully” and “bands of miscreants.” Nevertheless, that was too much viewpoint diversity for the paper’s activist-employees — and Bennet had to go.

It’s not only editors who need to watch their step. Columnists too are in danger. In March, Suzanne Moore of The Guardian wrote in defence of Selina Todd, an Oxford professor who was de-platformed for wrongthink on trans issues. Moore soon found herself facing an intense campaign of criticism. This included a condemnatory letter whose signatories included several of her own Guardian colleagues. Buzzfeed News reported on a further letter, this one apparently signed by hundreds of Guardian staff. Unlike James Bennet, this insider pile-on did not force Moore out. Still one doesn’t have to achieve a full cancellation to make others think twice before defying the party line.

Further reading

Why doesn't porn ever get cancelled?

By Sarah Ditum

Not that one has to be a public figure to be targeted. Earlier this month, the Washington Post decided to run a major story (getting on for 3,000 words of it) about a fancy dress party that happened two years ago. This was deemed newsworthy because a party guest had covered her face in black make-up. According to the article, the costume was intended as a satire on people thinking that wearing blackface is OK. The guest quickly regretted her decision and apologised for it. Nevertheless she was subsequently tracked down, named and ended up losing her job. Justin Trudeau is still in his though.

Another recent example is the bizarre story of how David Shor, a political data analyst whose work has contributed to Democrat election campaigns, got cancelled. His offence? Tweeting about research by a black academic showing how, in 1968, peaceful protests increased the Democratic vote while riots reduced it. For this, he was accused by members of his professional peer group of ‘anti-blackness’ and other affronts. His employers, a progressive data analytics company, fired him — though for reasons why are disputed. You can read more about this Kafkaesque tale here and here.

Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, we’ve had the Booker Prize Foundation’s cancellation of its honorary vice-president Baroness Nicholson, (see Janice Turner’s article for more). And also Graham Linehan, of Father Ted fame, getting banned from Twitter (trans transgressions, again).

So, no, it’s not just right-wingers who get cancelled. If they do or say the wrong thing — or merely do or say it in the wrong way — progressives can also find themselves in trouble. Indeed, on the principle of pour encourager les autres, liberals make the ideal cancellees.

*

Perhaps that’s the real reason why liberals are reluctant to speak-up — they’re afraid they’ll be next. As Winston Churchill said about appeasers, “each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last”.

What can liberals do to defend liberal values while standing clear of the snapping jaws? Well, one thing they could do is to name their ‘woke breaking point’ — to state publicly how much woke is too much. Think about it in terms of statues. It’s one thing to object to a monument to a slave trader (I’d certainly hate to have one in my town), but how much further would you want either the illegal topplings or the official removals to go? Where do you say ‘thus far and no further’? Should Churchill be safe? Gandhi too? I’ll admit this is fast becoming a clichéd question, but it does demand an answer — especially from those who fancy themselves cultural arbiters.

Further reading

The disturbing history of statue-smashing

By Sean Thomas

For commentators who believe that the woke threat has been exaggerated there is surely no risk. Either they are right and their lines in the sand will never be breached — or they are wrong, in which case they’d surely want to defend their liberal values. If you use your position of influence to say that the crocodile doesn’t exist (or only eats bad people) then you shouldn’t be afraid to have some skin in the game. If the mob does come for the monuments that you said wouldn’t be toppled, or the writers that you said wouldn’t be sacked, then you should be honour-bound to take a stand.

What is dishonourable (for a self-professed liberal) is to make excuses, or stay conveniently silent, no matter how many times that liberties are encroached upon, or history erased, or language twisted out of shape, or the blatantly irrational imposed as incontestable truth.

*

Note that liberals don’t have to choose the same breaking points as their reactionary opponents. They can heartily approve of getting slave traders out of the public square or banning racist trolls from social media sites. Indeed, this isn’t only about wokeness and anti-wokeness — because not all the threats to free speech are about overtly woke issues.

For instance, in April, the CEO of YouTube announced that content contradicting the World Health Organisation advice on Covid-19 would be banned from the site. One can certainly see the wisdom in denying snake-oil salesmen a platform to peddle their wares. But equally one should see the danger of shutting down sensible debate on scientific questions that have yet to be settled. For instance, take a look at this UnHerd interview with Professor Karol Sikora. Can any true liberal be comfortable with the fact that this entirely reasonable discussion of an important issue was taken down by YouTube for “violating guidelines”? Or that the limits of allowable debate in major forums are now defined by the official line of a UN quango (which, by the way, goes against its own previously published guidance — e.g. by U-turning on the use of face coverings)?

more from this author

Why heroes should wear masks

By Peter Franklin

If a spirit of intolerance and paranoia takes hold of our most important institutions — whether in academia, the media, politics or the arts — then that, ultimately, is a threat to everyone. If you can’t find it within you to defend the rights of those you disagree with, then at least think of yourself.

“Deep down, I want to be a Cambodian police woman,” responded Cleese, apparently facetiously (although how anyone could be sure he was facetious when we’re all supposed to be the expert on our own identity is beyond me), at which point numerous people started saying he was transphobic and lots of news sites started writing stories about how people were saying he was transphobic.

Suggested reading

Why I had to leave The Guardian

By Suzanne Moore

None of this is interesting, exactly. What’s interesting is the tone of wounded possessiveness that animated the reaction to Cleese. Not John Cleese, of all people! seemed to be the widespread implication, as though he had previously given everyone to believe that he was team “trans women are women and burn anyone who says otherwise”.

Presumably anyone experiencing this as a particular injury would be a fan of Cleese, but not enough of a fan that they’d seen his most famous work. Anyone who’s watched half an episode of Monty Python knows that it’s full of the kind of cross-dressing lols that would raise a stern eyebrow in a doctrinaire student union today. Python drag is funny, which is precisely why it cannot stand: it relies on the audience recognising a man in a dress as a man in a dress, rather than taking the dress as ultimate evidence the person wearing it is a woman.

And anyone who’s watched more than half an episode of Monty Python has probably seen Life of Brian, which means they’ve seen the “Loretta” scene, in which Eric Idle’s character Stan announces: “From now on, I want you all to call me Loretta. It’s my right as a man.” Cleese’s role here is to be the voice of incredulity: “I’m not oppressing you Stan, you haven’t got a womb!” Perhaps the Pythons were simply engaging in absurdity with no knowledge of the existence of trans people when they were making Brian in 1978; but given that the highly publicised Corbett v Corbett case involving April Ashley (a trans woman) took place in 1969, and Jan Morris published her transition memoir Conundrum in 1974, perhaps not.

This doesn’t make Cleese guilty of historical transphobia any more than supporting Rowling makes him guilty of it now, but it does put him at odds with the kind of respectful solemnity around gender identity that his disappointed admirers were expecting him to show. And this is really because they weren’t thinking of Cleese in terms of his actual work, but instead constructing the kind of figure they want him to be based on his place in the culture. Comedians are supposed to be liberals, whatever liberal means.

Suggested reading

How I was cancelled by Doctor Who

By Gareth Roberts

If there’s an “us” and a “them”, Cleese’s anarchic, authority-tweaking kind of comedy is supposed to belong to the “us” rather than the censorious, rule-enforcing “them”. If his opinions are experienced as betrayals, it’s because there’s an assumption that humour takes a position regarding power (and then, subsidiary to that, an assumption that the trans cause is the cause of the powerless against the powerful, even when it involves telling a victim of domestic violence to choke on a girldick, but we will gloss over that for now).

Cleese came up, pre-Python, as part of the 1960s satire boom that included Private Eye and David Frost. It’s a movement that has irrevocable associations with the rise of the counterculture and the demise of deference (the 1966 “I know my place” sketch from The Frost Report, which featured Cleese along with Ronnies Barker and Corbett, couldn’t have been a more explicit jab at the complacencies of the British class system). But a refusal to take the establishment seriously doesn’t necessarily imply anything at all about your own politics.

Maybe we think of comedy — and satire particularly — as inherently liberal because it’s bound up with the liberal cause of free speech. Life of Brian was picketed and preached against on release because of its blasphemy: in some places, it was banned (a screening in Torquay needed a special dispensation in 2008), and the Pythons were set at odds with authority figures of Christian conservatism such as Mary Whitehouse.

Or maybe it’s a product of the “punching up” theory of comedy, which holds that jokes should always take aim at the powerful. In a 2013 essay, the stand-up Stewart Lee argued that Right-wing comedy was practically impossible: “You can’t be a Right-wing clown without some character caveat, some vulnerability, some obvious flaw. You’re on the right. You’ve already won.”

Suggested reading

How Private Eye lost its bite

By Robin Aitken

There’s a truth in this, in that what’s funny often draws on the kind of exaggerated rhetoric that outrage can licence. Think of Cleese, this time as Basil Fawlty, finally losing his temper in a limb-flailing fury at some presumptuous customer: it’s funny because, as awful as Fawlty is, there’s an acknowledged justice to his rages.

But there’s a long way from there to the idea that comedy must therefore be an agent of change, and even further to the idea that the changes it advocates must be liberal ones. Private Eye was the home of campaigning Left-wing journalist Paul Foot, and also of Christopher Booker, who saw out his later career denying climate change and defending big tobacco at the Telegraph.

Comedy’s natural state, often, is conservatism — at least in sitcom, which resets each episode to a default condition (peak-era Simpsons is the perfect sitcom, because cartoon characters don’t change in any of the inconvenient ways that human actors do). And just because satire laughs at authority doesn’t mean it’s out for revolt: the riotous days of carnival, thought the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, allowed a populace to turn the world upside down for a limited time, so they could go back to the established order afterwards. Satire can do the same.

It’s nice to think that what’s funny aligns with your political beliefs, but it’s also naïve, and anyone who imagines that they get to tell John Cleese what to think forgets that he’s been through this once before with Mary Whitehouse, and won. She didn’t end up as an enemy of comedy because she was a Right-winger fronting up to Left-wingers, but because she was someone who took her faith so seriously that it was anguish for her to see others take it lightly. The people riled by Cleese’s tweeting might think they’re her opposite, but in their horror that someone might be cleaving to an apostate position, they’re really her inheritors.

Back then, fantasy was a nerd hobby. Today, though, both fantasy and the moral policing of fantasy seems increasingly mainstream. Fantasy novels can be pulled for wrongthink and even wildly successful fantasy authors such as JK Rowling get dogpiled. Not even actors representing fantasy characters are safe: witness the treatment meted out to Mandalorian actress Gina Carano after being judged by the court of social media to be guilty of heresy.

To those uninterested in fantasy “fandoms”, these may seem absurd dramas. After all, when we’re talking about imaginary worlds populated by imaginary people, who cares about the private opinions of those who create the stories, or represent them on TV?

This dismissive attitude is a mistake. The truth is that a culture’s ideals are always delivered via stories, and in most cultures telling and re-telling these has been taken very seriously indeed. It’s only in our modern world that tales of gods and monsters, rather than taking centre stage in our shared cultural life, have been shoved off into a box called “fantasy fiction” and treated as a mezzobrow hobby for the incorrigibly childish.

It should be clear by now that I have a personal stake here: I’m a full-bore fantasy fiction nerd. Whether it’s solemn sword-and-sorcery, the comic adventures of Terry Pratchett, or the weird worlds of China Miéville or Josiah Banks, if it’s even half-decently written and concerns fantastic kingdoms and impossible adventures I’m there. But I’m also, to a modest extent, interested in literary history. And it’s striking how fantasy fiction popped into existence as a Western genre more or less at the exact point where epic poetry in the classical style stopped being taken seriously.

Rewind a few hundred years, and everyone writing in English sprinkled references to the Greek and Roman gods into their stories and poems, while the Homeric myths occupied a place in the Western imagination almost as central as the Bible. It’s difficult to imagine today but figures such as Athena, goddess of war and wisdom, Circe the sorceress and snake-headed Medusa were common cultural reference points for the educated class.

More from this author

Feminists shouldn't have sex before marriage

By Mary Harrington

And it wasn’t just the mythic memes of antiquity that larded our literature — it was the forms as well. The hero’s quest, as set out in The Iliad and The Odyssey, and later in Virgil’s Aeneid, formed a template for heroic narrative that continued almost unchanged into the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Countless authors borrowed, imitated, translated and ironically reworked the epic mode, from Spenser’s hallucinatory Faerie Queene (1590) to Milton’s barnstorming retelling of the Christian story, Paradise Lost (1667), to arguably the last effort at epic poetry, Byron’s Don Juan (1819). But it couldn’t last. In Don Juan, Byron captured something sad but unmistakably true: the classical epics were losing their aura, leaving behind only a sense of lost grandeur. As Byron’s hero laments, while trapped on a Greek island (with only a nubile pirate princess for company):

THE isles of Greece! the isles of Greece
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.

Byron’s 16,000 lines of satire, sex and mourning for the vanished glories of classical antiquity put paid to epic as a usable form for anyone with a desire to be taken seriously as a writer. Or was it science? Imagine a looming form that by candlelight seems a shadowy, terrible monster — then turns out, with the lights switched on, to be just a coat-stand. With scientists explaining away ever more of the world’s mysteries by the light of reason, maybe the old gods just started to look a bit silly.

So a few short decades later, the epic style migrated into the first fantasy novels: George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858), and the children’s adventure The Princess and the Goblin (1871). Even as epic poetry died off, modern fantasy fiction was born.

The high point for our rational world — Peak Reason, if you will — was probably the end of the Cold War, when it seemed all the grand battles between good and evil had been won. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it was in the 1980s that the fantasy market went supernova.

Remembering my adolescence in the 1990s, the everyday world seemed flat, dull and stripped of all enchantment. But fantasy blossomed: after my baptism-by-Belgariad, I fell feet-first into the then freshly-published greats of modern fantasy, by now-classic authors such as Robin Hobb, Tad Williams and of course JK Rowling. Epic imagination scaled new heights, even as geopolitics sought perpetual peace under the “liberal international order”, the Communist threat evaporated, and the scope for heroic achievement in the “real” world seemed as vanished as Byron’s vision of classical Greece.

More from this author

Prince Harry is royal Kryptonite

By Mary Harrington

Those who went on dreaming of earth-shattering battles or heroes plucked from obscurity to save the universe have spent the Age of Reason with their heads down. Tolkien’s classic of 20th-century fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, is one of the best-selling books of all time; but one 1955 letter to WH Auden, Tolkien ruefully describes being “scourged with such terms as ‘pubescent’ and ‘infantilism'”. And everyone loves dragging millennials about the Harry Potter thing.

But while science has plenty to say about the “what” and “how” of our world, it has far less to offer on “why”. We may laugh at the tweeness of being a Harry Potter obsessive in your thirties, or someone with a mortgage and two kids cosplaying at a Star Wars convention. But we’re not so different from our fireside-storytelling ancestors, in craving stories that help us get at the dark, strange questions — or the big ones about power, empire, good and evil.

And while mythology seemed temporarily defeated by the End of History, today successive crises of finance, terrorism and pandemic have shown our world to be far more dangerous and unpredictable than we once imagined. So even as history has come roaring back, we shouldn’t be surprised to see gods and monsters doing the same. They might take the form of Baby Yoda memes or emetic Gryffindor avatars, but they’re playing the same role as the Greek and Roman pantheon centuries ago: providing a common narrative language for debates about the big questions.

From this perspective it’s easier to see how quarrels over whether or not an actress thinks you should wear a mask, or what JK Rowling thinks about transgender women, aren’t ludicrous culture war sideshows at all. Rather, they’re border skirmishes over the content of our moral operating system. The woke grasp this fact instinctively, which is why they reserve a special fury for policing heresy in our emerging new mythologies.

But the new would-be guardians of our epic mythologies are likely to find in time that their subject has a habit of escaping their control. The long history of stories that survive and replicate tells us it’s not the morally correct ones that make the cut, but the ones that ring true. No one today reads that classic of 17^th-century woke literature, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, unless they absolutely have to. Meanwhile, it’s a testament to the continued power of the old pantheons, that having disappeared from highbrow literature, they’ve since reappeared in (among other things) PlayStation games and the Marvel universe.

Suggested reading

Harry Potter fans need to grow up

By Sam Leith

And the power of such gods lies partly in their refusal to be domesticated: they’re two-faced, ambivalent, bloody, capricious and awe-inspiring. They’re not at all inclusive. They carry a payload of intuitions about — for example — the persistence of power, violence and hierarchy, the often-untidy dynamics between the sexes, and the obnoxiousness of heroic personalities, that don’t sit comfortably with the sanitised modern imagination. Stories are too unruly to be easily contained by moral correctness.

It was the pursuit of Reason that chased the old gods into the shadows of children’s literature. But today, our faith in Reason is well on its way to collapsing. David Goodhart wrote recently about how, as media control has decentralised in the internet age, what looked like a consensus on “objective” discourse has been upended by a tidal wave of emotionally inflected personal testimony. Even the New York Times, which has for decades styled itself as the objective ‘paper of record’, has been convulsed by civil war over whether it should instead embrace more polemical, politicised stances.

As the lights go out and we see the world by firelight again, expect to discover the old gods striding, full-sized, across our imaginations again. We may find their return a mixed blessing.

Distraction has always been a triggering word for me. In a good way. My PhD supervisor told me I was “a woman of too many distractions”. This was because I was venturing into journalism, frustrated by the dead language of academia. She also asked me whether having a grant made any difference. It turns out that my distractions were paying the rent, as they have been ever since.

Even though I’d been writing for them for decades, editors consistently try to steer me towards “lifestyle” subjects for my column. One even suggests that I shouldn’t touch politics at all. And yet I won the Orwell Prize for political journalism the year before. This was for articles on Brexit and war remembrance, among other things.

Maybe they were steering me away from certain subjects because they thought they were dealing with some mad old bint, or maybe they were scared and had been indoctrinated into the cult of righteousness that the Guardian embodies. At its best, the paper deserves to see itself as a beacon of the Left, but lately it has been hard to define what the Left consists of beyond smug affirmation. During the Corbyn years the paper had a difficult job to do: support Labour but to be honest about Corbyn and his cronies’ monstrous failings.

Of course, not every editor is nervous; but the anxiety around certain issues remains tangible. It has often been this way and none of this is new to me. Bad columns don’t come from bad opinions, they come from a lack of conviction. Readers know that instinctively, so to steer writers away from what they want to write about is a strange thing for an editor to do.

But, then, journalism has been in a strange place lately, unsure of itself and what it should be doing and giving itself away for free. A case of low self-esteem one might say, but not in my paper which makes journalists redundant even as it pays moderators to delete comments calling me a cunt under one of my columns about Scottish independence. Have I got issues? More than enough to go round.

My relationship with the paper has always been slightly odd, I guess.

So, I finally get to write a piece on trans issues. And 338 “colleagues” write a letter of complaint to the editor, alluding to that column.

Strung out to cry

Now, six months on, I have resigned. And I am still trying to work out why I have been treated so appallingly.

My hurt is obviously minuscule compared to so much of what has happened in the world. It’s a flesh wound and I shouldn’t make a fuss. But, do I look like a doormat with Welcome written on it?

There were no such upset letters organised regarding the various hot Tory takes about difficult subjects that we sometimes publish. Seumas Milne even reprinted a sermon by Osama Bin Laden. What about that? Not a word. So what did I do that was so terrible? I stepped outside the orthodoxy.

Perhaps I need to put my denunciation into a larger context. At the end of the year one reflects, right?

When I was first at the paper, in the 1990s, there were no women on the Comment pages. My column featured in the “Women’s pages”, which was seen as Features. The editor at the time, Peter Preston, took me out for an awkward lunch after I won Columnist of the Year at the British Press Awards and said: “It must be nice to be a lady columnist. You can write about painting your toenails.”

I had been meaning to raise the idea of an actual pay rise, but I had no idea how to do it. I don’t understand middle-class people and money (not that Preston was middle class but certainly his environment was totally bourgeois). So when he asked if there was anything he could do to make me happier, I just blurted out: “Give me more money.”

Preston’s power lay in silence. He had, after all, spent time in an iron lung. His ability to not speak was quite something, and I admired his refusal to make others comfortable. In one way. But I may as well have just farted loudly. I had made some awful faux pas: asking to be paid the same as men who were not as good as me. That was the end of the meal.

The thing is, I had found out I was being paid less than half what my male counterparts were earning. So I got an agent. She wore very short skirts and had a way of rattling her BMW keys that seemed to unnerve men. The one and only time Preston ever called me was to frantically beg — no uncomfortable silences — that he would never have to see her again. Result.

Another part of not knowing my place was that I also asked to be moved from the Women’s pages to the Comment pages. They offered a Monday slot which would mean I had to work on Sundays. As the only woman in the section, and single parent to boot, I asked them if they had ever heard of equal opportunities. Again I was not only unclubbable but unspeakable. No movement was possible. Madly, I suggested that Hugo Young be moved. I didn’t even realise he was Jesus in the hierarchy, floating above us all.

Watch Suzanne Moore’s interview with UnHerd’s LockdownTV:

The truth was, and remains that I never fitted in at the Guardian. The personal becomes political at the moment you never feel clean enough. I was always somehow inappropriate. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas said, dirt is “matter out of place”. Matter out of place. I know this feeling. I would describe it as an essential part of my political formation, this knowledge that I could scrub myself raw and it would never be enough.

Back then, I was in the office a bit, but was never given my own desk and grew bored hearing conversations about cricket and having various guys yell the names of Oxbridge colleges that I hadn’t been to at me. Telling them that I had been to a polytechnic was information some of them basically couldn’t compute.

The only people who were nice to me were Will Hutton and Richard Gott, who I was very fond of, although it turned out he had taken “red gold” from the KGB and he had to resign. A shame really, but not unfamiliar to me as I had worked at Marxism Today, which it turns out had similar “funding issues”. Let’s not go there now. I liked Richard because he would tell me fabulous stories about finding Che Guevara’s body one day and the next talk about a great Spanish fashion designer. The politics guys were dull, living on Planet Westminster. Plus ça change.

Listen to Suzanne Moore’s interview with UnHerd’s LockdownTV:

Leaving home

Fickle power-crazed harpie that I was, though, I got poached. I love that word. Off I went to The Independent, enticed by Andrew Marr’s exciting vision of having no news on the front page. Also there was no question that I wouldn’t be on the Comment page. It was great working there, I loved it, though it was all to go tits up.

The relevance of this? This was my original sin. No one leaves The Guardian. I had left the cult.

It was to get worse, as when I left the Independent, I went to The Mail on Sunday. The Indy was collapsing and The Mail on Sunday offered me a bit more money and many more readers. I thought it would be interesting to talk to the people who would decide the future of the country and I was bored with preaching to the converted.

Plus, there was the challenge of doing a tabloid column. This is much harder than long rambling pieces: The Times’s Matthew Parris told me so, bless him. The great and the good told me again that I was making a terrible mistake and I would lose my voice. This was another denunciation of sorts. Once again I was in the headmistress’ office chewing gum and telling my teachers I didn’t need them. I left school at 16 because rules did not interest me. Reading did.

This new idea, though, of talking to floating voters appealed. Politically. The very idea! And yet they were the ones deciding who was in power. They are now the ones the Left still despises while needing to win over. The Left could not and still cannot represent those whose “false consciousness” stops them from seeing the true and rightful path.

I cannot say how much I despise this way of thinking, having grown up in a Tory-voting working-class household. Don’t ask me to hate those I love in the name of socialism.

Mind you, clearly at one point I did think just like this. I wanted them all executed and joined the Workers Revolutionary Party in this hope.

Then I grew up. Not much, it must be said.

Now I was at The Mail on Sunday I was no longer pure. The dark side had claimed me. This was utter bollocks but it’s the way so much of the Left thinks, in binary terms. Electoral politics, which could be about persuasion, instead becomes a series of war games.

The Marxist philosopher Eric Hobsbawm, of all people, thought it a good idea for me to talk to “Middle England”. Middle England is a fantasy in my book. An imagined community. Still, my contract said I could write what I liked and that was honored. Anyway, I presumed it was a temporary job, like all jobs in journalism. I didn’t even start hackery till I was 30. I had a life before that. Thank god.

I lasted for several years at the Mail on Sunday, although I hankered to write longer pieces, which I did elsewhere. The lesson I learned was that I could get through to the paper’s readers on almost every social issue except immigration, where I could make no headway. This was to become key to so much of what has followed since. Facts are not feelings.

As I live in North London, when I moved to the Mail on Sunday, most people I knew who had read me regularly in the Guardian or the Indy thought I had just died. Actually I had gone from a readership of 300,000 to two million. Some of us didn’t need the arrival of social media to know about bubbles. Some of us couldn’t see a bubble without wanting to burst it. It’s a class thing.

At one point I was writing columns for both the Mail on Sunday and the Guardian (somehow, neither audience noticed) and eventually a new editor arrived at the former and wanted changes. That was fair enough, so I recommitted to the Guardian.

Back to the nest

Back among the righteous. Now, in the North London playground, other parents would talk to me — I became a “Guardian Writer” again. Resurrected somehow, absolved, I was more and more aware of the conservatism that was rising, politically and culturally.

We were being enveloped in beigeness. Especially women. When I had taken my older children to school in the late 1980s and 1990s, we had all just dropped them off and hurried to work. By 2010, mothers hung around the playground: “Lattes or pilates?” They didn’t have jobs, and made cushions. They had husbands, dogs and camper vans. Violin lessons were a thing and no one seemed to notice that the school had been ethnically cleansed. This was the work of property prices. They thought David Cameron seemed nice. This is, it’s true, a class issue, and something that’s particularly noticeable in my corner of North London. But there was definitely a wider move in modern conservatism to push women back into the home.

The electoral coalition that had brought Labour to power was collapsing. I didn’t find this out from Planet Westminster — for all my sins, I met and lunched Cameron — but from the playground. He will be prime minister I told the pol guys at the Mail. They put this down revoltingly to me fancying him. How could a woman know such things otherwise?

During my time at the Mail on Sunday there was no politician to whom we did not have access. They knew they needed that paper’s support. I have dined with every Right-wing bogeyman and every Labour bore you can imagine.

Going back to The Guardian brought another challenge. What should I be doing? I would describe my approach as: lobbing in some Molotov cocktails, some cultural analysis and some jokes. Not to buy into groupthink and in the end . . . entertainment. People should want to read what you write. I know this is verboten: actual pleasure. I chose not to go into the office. I still did not belong, having strayed from the true and rightful path.

Some debates had remained the same, some had changed. The Labour Party seemed to be imploding. Again. So I returned to my real passion: cultural politics and good old-fashioned feminism.

Seeing Red

In 2012, I contributed to an anthology of essays edited by the great poet and journalist Cathy Galvin. The theme was red. My piece was about the need for female anger and it was called “Seeing Red”. Feminism had become way too polite and we were going backwards. Fast.

The essay was about how and why women should be angry. I quoted the Liberian Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee: “Anger is like water; the shape it takes comes from the container you put it in.” Let it flow, I said. How little I knew.

The book came and went and the following year 2013 my essay was reprinted in the New Statesman. It contained this line: “We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape — that of a Brazilian transsexual.”

That was wrong — in that it was of its time. Now it’s a different body shape: the Kardashian ribless tits and ass. But hey, let’s roll with the times.

Suddenly I was inundated with tweets about the murder rate of Brazilian transsexuals which is appallingly high. Many of them are forced into sex work (I prefer the term prostitution but the new feminism likes to pretend all jobs are equal when they clearly are not. “Phoebe got four A-stars but hopes to become a sex worker” is not something you hear often.) But it’s true I had carelessly used a certain phrase to talk about the then fashionable shape for women; slim hips and big breasts. Indeed, transsexual models did appear on catwalks.

While I was trying to emphasise the impossibility of the ideals for women, maybe I had been thoughtless. I hadn’t actually killed anyone. Yet the backlash that hit me, online and offline, was like nothing else. And you have to understand I have been threatened in the past by the fascist group Combat 18 for my columns — on multiculturalism, immigration, being pro-choice and in favour of gay rights…  My crimes, back then, were “nigger-loving”, “paki-loving”, and “whore”. Sometimes they called me a “Jew”. I had panic buttons installed in my house. I would get phone calls at home with threats saying they knew I had kids so they wouldn’t kill me, just disable me. As ever I just got on with it. What else can you do?

But this time around, after the Red piece, the abuse was from the Left. It was a taste of what would happen in Labour a few years later with anti-Semitism.

When the big row over anti-Semitism happened, it was strangely no surprise; it had all just finally risen to the surface. I had spent enough time on the far-Left to know how the righteous thought. And it’s not so different from the far-Right. In the name of rights for Palestinians, this most elemental racism was once more permissible. A giant conspiracy theory that places itself on the moral high ground was not discouraged by the Labour leadership. It disgusts me.

Yet the abuse I got over the trans issue was different, and worse than anything that had come before. Social media was beginning to flex its muscles. It was a mindfuck. Twitter was full of people telling me how they were going to rape me, decapitate me, ejaculate inside my head, burn me. This was all somehow to do with the Brazilian transsexual remark. The police came round but they didn’t really get Twitter. They said things like: “Don’t email them back, love”. The worst threats were from people who knew where I lived and said that they would give my then 11-year-old a good fisting.

The sewer was opening, a torrent of women-hatred was pouring out, no one seemed to be able to control it. (Was this helping trans people? Was it coming from them? Mostly I think not.) I made the mistake of losing my temper and insulted my antagonists back. I would not be lectured on feminism or womanhood.

There was a new word. TERF. It posed as an acronym — trans exclusionary radical feminist — but it was used as a slur. On this row went. The label “transphobe” may as well have been tattooed on my forehead. My own history and activism was irrelevant: my years with Act Up, campaigning around Section 28, my lifelong commitment to campaigning for abortion. Nada!

I watched woman after woman denounced as a TERF. Attempted suicides of young trans people were the fault of women like me. The murder of trans people by men was somehow refracted onto feminists. Masculinity is never the problem, you see. Masculinity sets the rules. Women are always the other, the outsiders. Yet suicidal ideation is a growing issue for all young people — I studied counselling and psychotherapy for two years at this time — and suicide rates for young women are rising, too.

The Right Side of History

Why did I speak up? I have no hatred or fear of trans folk. As a feminist, I would argue that gender is socially constructed, and it can be reconstructed.

Under the professions of radicalism and the vitriol and stupidity, though, I was witnessing a new conservatism, the revenge of gender stereotypes. Pink and blue. Girl toys and boy toys. The female role models, such as Sam Cameron and Kate Middleton, were mute. Nostalgia was everywhere dressed up as irony.

During the Aids crisis, I was involved in queer politics, where difference was argued over endlessly. But we were on the same side against a straight world that hated homosexuality and women who wanted equality. Then that world fragmented. The queer alliance was fragile and the theories began to be more important than the practice. When academia moves in, activism moves out.

At the same time, women were getting ahead in the workplace by imitating men and pretending that children didn’t interfere with their wage slavery, now defined as “having it all”. Some act to pull off. I tried and failed. I had three children and worked the entire time. In my entire life, I have had eight weeks’ maternity leave.

Gender roles were becoming more fixed even as gay rights campaigners won the “victory” of gay marriage. I agreed with David Cameron that this was a basically conservative move and it cost nothing, and made people feel somehow that they were a bit modern. Gay rights and feminist campaigners were no longer the natural allies they had once been.

Looking back, I see that by the late Eighties and early Nineties, I had already picked up on something that perturbed me. A denial of female biology, of our ability to name and define our experience. Some of this came from certain strands of postmodern theory where objective reality gives way only to multiple subjectivities. A kind of gender tourism became possible. Everyone could be everything. A new kind of feminism came into being, one in which flesh and blood women and our desires became somehow a bit dull. Feminism without women. Grow a child inside you and push it out of your body and tell me this is a construct. (NB: no one has to have children.)

I believe quite simply bodies exist. I have been there when babies are born. And been there when people die. I know what happens when bodies no longer work…what shall we call my view? Materialism?

As trans ideology came into being, to question this was to question trans people’s “right to exist” — how is that even possible? They obviously exist! — when really we were questioning the ways in which we think about gender and oppression and how complex this all is.

It remains so. Yet somehow morality had entered the debate. To be good — ie, modern — one didn’t interrogate the new trans orthodoxy. Sex was no longer binary, but a spectrum, and people didn’t need to change their bodies to claim a new identity. All this was none of your business, and had no effect on your life.

I disagreed. By 2018, the atmosphere was poisonous. A fellow columnist at The Guardian replied to a message I sent about being civil at the Christmas do with: “You’ve prompted the most sickening transphobia, for which you have never apologised, you called islamophobia a myth and you publicly abuse leftwingers.” This person went on to say that I felt insecure “because a new generation of younger leftists have caught the public mood”. I didn’t even understand the accusation of Islamophobia. More broadly, I understood that the possibility of a left-wing government was exciting, but unlike half the paper, I didn’t believe that Corbyn had actually won in 2017. I also didn’t like the macho, bullying culture around him propped up by writers at my place of work.

I complained to my editor about this person at the time but was told that as neither of us were on staff, nothing official could be done. Really?

So there we have it. Here comes the “new generation”: the new Left, same as the old Left. Full of misogyny, utter pricks and those with the emotional intelligence of whelks. Misogyny in the name of socialism. Again.

Ladies who Lurch

Around this time I was in Armenia covering a story on foetal sex selection. Women were aborting female fetuses as they wanted boys. The UN population fund was doing fantastic work there, knowing that as fertility rates drop, sex selection becomes ever more prevalent. This world was a long, long way from those people who think sex is just a matter of personal choice. Foetal scans at 12 weeks mean generations of girls go “missing”. In rural Armenia I visited class rooms of 27 little boys and 5 girls, while at home I was told sex is simply “assigned at birth”.

Other women were now starting to be disturbed by the idea of transwomen with working male genitalia in womens spaces. The idea of the predatory trans person is not one I am particularly invested in, really. We are talking about a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage of the population. I am not that bothered about toilets or changing rooms. My youth was spent in gay clubs and with wonderful trans people who looked after me in New Orleans. Refuges, though? Prisons? Surely that can be sorted out and it has to be.

No, what I most didn’t and don’t like is the erasing of female bodies and female voices and female experience and our ability to name it.

What I care about fundamentally is the right of women to meet in single sex spaces and assert themselves as a class, a sex class — one that is oppressed by a patriarchal system. By men, even sometimes the good ones. As for the bad ones, they are the ones who rape and kill trans folk, too.

Feminism has to be able to talk about bodies. Many of the advances women have made in my lifetime — reproductive rights, more choice over how we give birth, discussions of menstruation and menopause — depend on biology, the biology we were now told was irrelevant.

When I walked past the Woman’s Place meeting in Brighton at the Labour Party conference last year, people were banging on the windows. More TERF-hunters. It hardly affected me, I was in a blur of distress about anti-Semitism, and a friend of mine who was dying. Her lung and bone cancer was missed and she had been told to do more yoga. Bodies fail us all in the end.

What sort of people would stop other people meeting, though? What good did it do the cause of trans people, some of whom were present at the event? Why can feminists not organise?

The moral climate had shifted from “trans rights are something we need to discuss and we must support trans people in all the ways we can” to a denial that such rights may at certain points compete with women’s rights. Friends were under threat, no-platformed in schools and universities if they questioned what had become a fixed set of beliefs.

Women who said that they were subject to threats of violence were told they had to suck it up. Any discussion of trans rights had now mutated into a denial of the existence of trans people and therefore actual violence.

Debate became murder

So while I and many others were receiving vile threats, we were somehow also responsible for the awful violence that is meted out to trans people. Social media blurred the conversation: very few trans people are murdered in Britain (around one a year) but the American stats are worse, so these are the ones used. In Britain at least two women a week are killed — estimated at 3.5 during lockdown — but women are never a marginalised group. We have it all!

In the States, trans healthcare is not free, either. So when American feminists tell us we are “behind” on trans rights, it rankles somewhat. Get your own house in order. We live in a country where abortion is free and legal and where health care for trans people, though not perfect, is free; and we have maternity leave. Neither country is perfect.

Various people who had not been there for the fight around Section 28 told us this was a re-run of that era, with trans folk being described as paedophiles and predators in the place of gay men. (As ever, lesbians were somehow invisible. Except the ones who wanted to transition.) This is revisionism. No one was being asked to give up anything for Section 28 to be dropped.

Gay people have chosen how they were to be referred to. In the trans debate, however, women were not consulted about their terms of reference. They are “Cis”. And “Cis” women are higher up the privilege ladder than trans women. We had become the oppressors — a subset of men.

Then came the rise of “non-binary”. Phew! Finally! By any definition of non-binary, this is what I am. The knowledge that since I was a tiny child my inner and outer selves did not match in any way. Knowingly, I upped the signifiers of femininity to be able to use the power of my mind. This was what I got in trouble with Germaine Greer for: hair, heels, tits. To me, just my drag. Presumably it is the same for everyone.

The Bad Column

Which brings us to March 2020. Eventually, I was allowed by a great editor to write about how gender critical women wanted to assert their basic rights. A professor of working-class history at Oxford, Selina Todd, was disinvited from an event. I noted, referring to this incident, that it is women again, never men, who were losing jobs, incomes and public platforms if they spoke up. Many of them were emailing me: not on one side or another, but generally worried. I wrote that I believed biological sex to be real and that it’s not transphobic to understand basic science. To my mind the column was fairly mild.

It was published. The next thing I know there are loads of people on social media thanking me for saying what needed to be said. And then another lot: the “die in a ditch terf” lot, amazingly telling me to die in a ditch. Again.

Seven years of this sort of abuse now, and no one from the Guardian had ever spoken to me about it. I just carried on. Do they care? Why should they? They should care, if they truly want more “diversity” in journalism, but that’s a lie which liberals tell themselves. How can you bring on working-class writers if you damn them for not knowing the codes upon which the media runs? If you won’t tolerate the heresies of outsiders? If — gasp — they haven’t been to Oxbridge?

In the new orthodoxy, where do I fit in? What is my place in the tickbox set of Left beliefs? I was Brexity, though I voted Remain. I want independence for Scotland and a united Ireland. I want England to be England. I don’t believe in the monarchy or the UK. I think biological sex is real… I have never hidden any of these views.

My experience is that I have been censored more by the Left than the Right and it gives me no pleasure to say that. Laziness of thought is my big fear, this unthinking adherence to some simplistic orthodoxy. There are values and there is experience and there are people. Complicated fuckers, all of us. The Guardian. Labour-supporting except for its Lib Dem blip in 2010. Endlessly “good”. Yeah; right.

I was discussed at “conference”, the newspaper morning meeting open to all: editorial, digital, advertising, everyone. (It looks like equality, but some people sit on the floor and others get seats, let’s put it that way.) I never go in to the office, or attend conference, but it was reported that a trans woman developer, who had already resigned some weeks earlier, resigned again that morning, because my words, my column, had made her feel unsafe. According to the news story: “the column was ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back,’ the trans employee said, following a series of pieces that pitted trans people against women and against women’s rights.”

Apparently, my fellow columnist Hadley Freeman defended me and I am grateful for that. It appeared to be an extremely upsetting incident for all concerned. I am sorry that it happened. No one will believe that, but I am.

The Letter

Then came the letter to the editor, expressing dismay about the Guardian being a publication “hostile to trans rights and trans employees”, since three trans people had apparently resigned in the last year. This was news to me. Although I wasn’t named in the letter, it was very clearly a response to my column. Three hundred and thirty-eight people signed it.

Not one of them had the decency to pick up the phone to me. Should The Guardian be a welcoming place for trans people to work in? Yes of course it bloody well should. Should it be a place where we discuss complicated issues? Again yes.

The letter made it clear to me that it wasn’t just social media activists who wanted me out of the paper. My fellow staff were gunning for me: time to hand over my job to the young Corbyn crew who spend their lives slagging off the mainstream media but cannot wait to be part of it. Could they write a good sentence? Say something from the heart? Does that matter? Apparently not, they simply think the right things.

The letter was then leaked to Buzzfeed and then the names were made public. I was devastated to find people who I like and had worked with had done this. In 30 years of journalism I have often disagreed with people and had stand-up rows with them but no one has ever done something so underhand as to try and get someone fired because of one column.

I listed the names of my denouncers on Twitter. I read one of them saying I doxxed them, not the case as the names were already in the public domain. I wrote a distraught and emotional letter to the people who I knew, asking how could they do this? What kind of victory had they achieved?

I felt fucking awful. Well, how would you feel if 338 colleagues basically bullied you? But off I went to Amsterdam to do a mushroom retreat because life goes on.

Mistakenly, I thought my editors would stand up for me because that was my experience at other papers; or they might issue a public statement. They didn’t. There was some internal email, and I hear it was discussed at the Scott Trust, which governs the paper. What this means I genuinely have no idea. Nor do I understand what editorial independence means any more. Do they? Not in my book.

This to me was utter cowardice. Shouldn’t you stand by your writers? But on this issue the Guardian has run scared. I suspect this is partly because of Guardian US sensitivities and, partly because the paper receives sponsorship from the Open Society foundation, which promotes trans rights.

This also might explain some of the utter gender gobbledegook we run about how HRT has taught someone to cry and all categories are porous. Whatever.

As a feminist, I have limited interest in all this, in the holes in which other people do or do not wish to put their bits. Sorry it’s rather dull. I am with Foucault in that I don’t believe sexuality is the essential soul or truth of an individual. My concern with this issue is only to do with the rights of women and the welfare of children.

So much of the discussion is about trans women, but the unhappiness of teenage girls must concern us. We have known since 2017 — earlier in fact — that there has been a huge uptick in female teenagers wanting to transition. Presenting to the Tavistock with self harm, eating disorders or suicidal ideation, these girls may end up on puberty-blocking hormones and then go on to have surgery. And for some of them that indeed may be the right thing to do. For others though, it clearly isn’t and to question that is not anything phobic, it is to care.

Why, as feminists, can we not talk about this epidemic of young women who cannot bear their bodies and the thought of what is happening to them: breasts, periods, unwanted sexual attention, the works? Why can you not be a young butch lesbian these days?

In an ideal world, feelings of masculinity or femininity could be achieved without surgery or hormones that may cause infertility. We are far from such a world and I respect the decisions of adults who go through this long, difficult process in often impossible circumstances. Brave, brave people.

My argument to my newspaper, though, has always been if we don’t have this discussion then the Right will, and indeed that has been the case. The Spectator and the Times have covered stories we haven’t, and I have had to write what I wanted to in the Telegraph. Investigative journalism means going into no-go areas. Why can’t we? The liberal Left looks not virtuous but naïve.

Less sexy subjects such as the appalling low rate for rape convictions, the Covid pandemic causing women to lose jobs and be forced back into the home, the complete lack of childcare… all of these things fall by the wayside when the main discussions of feminism appear to be by men telling us men can just say they’re women and if we say otherwise we deserve all the rape threats we get.

There is no actual interrogation of gender and I say this as someone who has written about and studied this subject for decades. There is a simply a belief system.

The Witches They Cannot Burn

For such thoughts, I have been denounced, alongside bigger and better people such as JK Rowling. The words “compassion” and “kindness” are often used by trans activists. Can we all just not be kinder? Well, yes … I never have and never would be unkind to someone because of their gender identity. I reserve the right not to kowtow to certain blokes, though. What I would like is some kindness towards women, some empathy towards our fears and our concerns, but I don’t see much of that. What have you done for us lately?

Since my denouncement, I have received nothing but support from all sorts of people in private, including many at the paper who are now afraid for their jobs. I didn’t stop writing, I carried on. “Don’t mention the war, Suzanne.” It felt quite schizophrenic, the split between the groundswell of women who are thinking along the same lines as me and the lack of support from the institution I work for.

The censorship continues and I cannot abide it. Every day another woman loses her job and a witch-burning occurs on Twitter. My fear is not about trans people but an ideology that means the erasure of women — not just the word, but of our ability to name and describe our experience. We are now cervix-havers, birthing parents, people who menstruate. On Amnesty’s latest posters to support the women’s strike in Poland, the literal translation from Polish for the thousands of women who were protesting the awful tightening of abortion laws was: “I stand with people in Poland”. Which people? Women forced to give birth on a plastic sheet to a dead baby with foetal defects? Say it.

Nor do I buy the idea that all of this is a purely generational issue. In part it is, sure, but it can at times be an issue of unfettered misogyny and a failure to understand that many women’s rights are fairly recent and always contested.

The Left — well, I guess I mean the Labour Party with its mad insistence on conformity — just stopped listening. As the Corbyn project collapsed, the cultural battle around trans issues became a proxy war of insane proportions. The Labour leadership contenders were ordered to sign a pledge which called Woman’s Place a “hate group”. With the exception of Keir Starmer, they did. “Transphobe” was now a slur to throw at anyone who didn’t keep the faith. You lose the electorate so what happens. Do you reflect?

No, apparently armed with misread Gramsci and a smidgeon of Chomsky you decide you will redefine common sense without persuading people to your side. Calling everyone unconvinced by your politics racist homophobes as an electoral strategy never sat well with me. Call me precious. The utter failure of the People’s Vote told us that, surely? The haute Remain position consisted mostly of telling Leave voters they were idiots.

Likewise, alienating women who are lifelong Labour supporters, because of their refusal to sign away what they feel to be their hard-won rights, is a performative gesture that I am unconvinced provides any actual “wins” for anyone.

Yet this one tiny issue has somehow come to dominate every debate now on feminism. It’s boring. Something has got terribly skewed here. Something has been lost and I am lost in it.

There is obviously bigger and more important stuff to deal with than the issue of the liberation of women. There always is. My hurt at being ejected from cults I never belonged in anyway is not self-pity. That dissolves the moment I have the freedom to speak my truth.

The things I want to talk about — the deep unhappiness of women, the suffocating girdle of masculinity, the ever growing and bleak inequalities, the falling fertility rates which will mean girls don’t get to be born, rape as a war crime, FGM — these things are hard enough to do anyway. To understand that women’s bodies are used and abused however we might feel about them is not a comfortable place to be. Our relationship with our bodies is not straightforward. I am sure it’s the same for many men.

Now that I have personally transitioned — my uterus no longer works, my estrogen has dropped — I have even less fucks to give than I did before. You can denounce me as much as you like but you cannot deny my life’s work of living somehow inside this female body. You cannot tell me it’s not real. It’s as real as it gets.

This, then, is a story about a woman journalist who “made it”, who never thought it would be easy.

This is a story about a feminist who started to see things going backwards and wanted to tell the world. This is not a story about trans people at all. Really it isn’t. It’s a story about not belonging. Not knowing my place.

Sure I understand the clichéd trajectory that as one grows older, one moves from Left to Right. Actually, I would say in my case this is not so: class politics becomes ever more pertinent to me, not less. In these fearful reactionary times, I will not be fearful and I will not be reactionary, but I will centre women and children and the possibility of freedom, as I always have, at the heart of my work.

The consequences of this have been tough in a tough year. The support both within and without the paper for which I write has been huge and I am grateful for it. I remain flame-retardant.

All this is then just a little story about being given a warning to shut up. And refusing to. I have had a lifetime of such warnings. Class will out. This is just something I wanted to tell you about a woman saying no. And the ways we say no.

That’s all it is. That’s the rub.

That’s all it takes sometimes.

Listen to Suzanne Moore’s interview with UnHerd’s LockdownTV:

I remember at the time thinking “Oh god,” because the exercises themselves sounded a little woo-ish: breathe in five times, holding your breath for five seconds each time, then cough vigorously on the sixth. But, to me, the more interesting thing was it also involved lying on your front: “proning”. Apparently it took pressure off the airways of the lungs.

There have been a million short-lived excitements around Covid-19. For a while in the early months people were worried about a correlation with taking ibuprofen; there was the “is smoking protective?” business; there was the incident with hydroxychloroquine, over which we shall draw a discreet veil. Most of them flared up for a moment, then were forgotten: as clinicians and researchers try to do science at speed, there are inevitably going to be a few interesting ideas that go nowhere.

Yet if you were to Google “proning” you would find that it hasn’t quite gone away. A pair of doctors writing in the journal Thorax this month have had a look at the evidence, and found that it might be of some benefit; they cite studies finding apparently large benefits for patients who required intubation and ventilation, and more ambiguous benefits for patients who were awake and not on ventilation.

Those studies are all small, looking at 20-odd patients each, and I imagine not rigorously controlled or randomised. But according to Rupert Beale, director of the Cell Biology of Infection lab at the Crick Institute, “the evidence is very strong for proning. Doctors in Italy were talking about it having an effect quite early on, and there are good physiological reasons to believe it.”

My point isn’t that proning is some cure-all and if we all go around on our bellies like snakes all day we’ll defeat the virus (“Wriggle for Victory!”). It’s that small and unsexy changes in treatment probably have some non-negligible benefits for a subset of patients. If you were to get the disease now, there is a very slightly smaller chance that you will die than in April, because doctors know that in some cases, it might help to lie you on your front.

In recent weeks, there’s been a little bit of interest in what looks like a decline in the infection fatality rate of Covid-19. To refresh your memory: the “case fatality rate”, CFR, of a disease is the number of deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases. The “infection fatality rate”, IFR, is the number of deaths divided by the number of actual infections. So if 10,000 people get a disease, and you detect 1,000 of them with testing, and then 100 of them die, then your CFR is 10% (100/1000) but your IFR is 1% (100/10,000). Your CFR is dependent on how many people you are testing; the IFR is not, or at least not directly.

It’s very hard to tell what’s going on with the IFR, because, obviously, you don’t know how many people actually have the disease: you only know how many tests have come back positive. And, earlier in the disease, we simply weren’t doing enough tests. We are in a better situation now, and the ONS and others have been using random surveys of the population (a bit like doing an opinion poll, except with nasal swabs and blood samples) to establish what percentage have either the active virus or antibodies at any given time. But it’s still very hard.

Nonetheless, the best guess is that it probably has come down. Adam Kucharski, a lecturer in mathematical modelling of disease at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says that during the first wave in Britain, probably about 1% of all the people who were infected went on to die. Now, he thinks, it’s probably more like 0.5%. “The ONS put it at 10,000 new infections per day a couple of weeks ago,” he says. With an average time between infection and death of about three weeks, an IFR of 0.5% would imply about 50 deaths a day, so we’d expect that next week – and we’re currently seeing a seven-day rolling average of 30, with 70 new deaths announced on Monday, so that’s “sort of the territory we’re getting into now”, says Kucharski.

So, on the face of it, your risk of death if you get infected with coronavirus now is probably about half what it was in March or April. The question is: why?

First things first: it’s almost certainly not because the virus has mutated or anything. “There are some things we know are definitely not true,” says Beale. “We’re convinced that the virus itself isn’t substantially different, that there’s no ‘milder form’ of the virus.” The little package of RNA in its protein-and-lipid wrapper is essentially the same now as it was at the beginning of the outbreak.

And there are some things we know definitely are true. At the moment, the age profile of the people getting infected is much lower than it was in the first wave. “It’s circling more among young people, and less in care homes and hospitals,” says Beale. Young people are much less likely to die than older people, so that simple demographic fact will have brought the IFR down. He thinks that “accounts for the majority of the effect”. Kucharski agrees: he points to Singapore, where there have been about 50,000 cases but only 27 deaths, because it has spread almost entirely among young, healthy, working people. “The IFR is very sensitive to age,” he says.

More from this author

Is this the second wave?

By Tom Chivers

It probably isn’t the whole story, though. According to Sheila Bird of the University of Cambridge’s MRC Biostatistics unit, there probably has been a “decent reduction in the mortality rate — a 20%, 30% reduction” because of “improved treatment and improved knowledge”.

We all know some of the things which that means. Dexamethasone is the big one, a cheap and widely available drug that can reduce mortality rates in some groups of patients by about 30%. That has been shown in major clinical trials.

But although doctors are, these days, very much evidence-based people who pay attention to clinical trials, it’s not all they pay attention to. Just as they always did, they also pay attention to what works in their clinics, what their colleagues tell them, to what seems plausible given what we know about the human body. “This is what we’re paid to do,” says Beale. “It’s not just massive clinical trials and dexamethasone. It’s about experience, and now we have a lot more of it than we did in April.” 

So things like proning are better-known now. Medics are less likely to put people on mechanical ventilation early, because there’s some evidence that can be unhelpful. Earlier use of anticoagulants has become more widespread: “a lot of the pathology is to do with clotting,” says Beale, “and the use of blood thinners is of ongoing interest.” 

The triage system is better now — medics will be better at reading the course of the disease, and pushing resources towards those who are most at risk. It’s also worth remembering that although the NHS was not overwhelmed, at one point there was about one ICU nurse for every three patients, rather than the usual one-to-one. “With the best will in the world, that will lead to worse outcomes,” he says. “Mistakes being made, things that would have been spotted 30 minutes earlier are not spotted, and people deteriorate quickly.”

It’s not just about knowing the things to do — it’s about avoiding the things that cause harm, as well. “We were clueless in March,” says Beale. “People are less incompetent now. All sorts of things were happening — vulnerable patients being exposed in daft ways. The mortality among dialysis patients was horrific — something like 30%.” The staff would protect them carefully while they were in the units, “then they’d put them all in the same taxi to go home, all sitting next to each other, with no masks, gloves, anything.”

There’s another possibility, which Beale calls “informed speculation” rather than a well-evidenced fact: the possibility that things like social distancing and mask-wearing have reduced the initial amount of virus that people are exposed to, and perhaps changed the ways they are exposed to it. Your body finds it easier to fight off a small amount of virus than if a huge load is introduced at the same time, and there is, he says, some evidence from animal models that orally ingesting the virus is less deadly than inhaling it. (“That is in hamsters,” though, he warns sternly. Don’t take it at face value.) If that’s true — and, again, it’s just a plausible guess, rather than scientific fact — then, he says, it’s good reason to push for continued use of masks and social distancing: it may be that as well as reducing the disease’s spread, they make the disease a bit less deadly when you get it.

Beale suggests that, in order of importance, the three factors are 1) the changing age profile of patients, 2) improved management of the disease, and 3) this possible reduction in how much virus the average patient is exposed to. 

More from this author

Covid could become the new common cold

By Tom Chivers

But Bird adds an interesting extra complication: points 1) and 2) are not independent. It’s not random that fewer old people are getting infected. That’s deliberate — or, rather, the fact that so many of them were infected during the first wave was a sad failure. “There will be a shift in the age distribution of those who develop serious disease,” she says, “because we have got better at protecting the most vulnerable.” We have got better at managing the disease, and that includes managing who gets the disease in the first place. 

This all sounds fairly hopeful — and it is, to some degree. But there are a few points worth noting. First, a lot of the improvement is a symptom of the UK having done so badly the first time around. Globally, according to Kucharski, the IFR looks like it was about 0.6%. In Britain it seems to have been more like 1%, because the disease was so rampant among vulnerable populations in hospitals and care homes. It’s easy to do better than last time if you really screwed up last time.

Second, death isn’t the only negative outcome. So while death is very rare among younger people, severe disease isn’t; I personally know four people under 40 (two under 30) who got Covid and suffered for months afterward. “If you spend three weeks in ICU, you’re not going to be too happy about it even if you do survive,” says Beale. “It’s possible that you’ll make a full recovery, but a lot of people don’t. And it’s fine telling people that you’re a fit and healthy 30-year-old so you’ve got a 0.01% chance of dying, but your chance of ending up in hospital is much higher, and people don’t fancy spending a week in hospital, frightened and short of breath.”

We shouldn’t downplay the seriousness of this disease even for many people who don’t die of it. The measures and changes we’ve discussed here will reduce the number of severely affected people, as well as deaths, but to what extent is not clear.

And third, says Kucharski, “if you improve your treatment it scales linearly, whereas if you target transmission it scales exponentially.” Let me explain what that means. Imagine you have a disease where, on average, each infected person gives it to three people. (So the reproductive number, R, is three.) And of every 100 people who get the disease, one person dies. (So the IFR is 1%).

Now imagine you have one person with the disease; they give it to three people; they give it to another three each, and so on. By the 10th generation, almost 90,000 people will have been infected*, and about 900 will have died.

Now imagine you develop some clever treatment that can reduce the IFR by 33%, from 1% to 0.67%. You will reduce the number of dead from around 900 to around 600. That’s a very big deal.

Suggested reading

When will the Covid-19 vaccine arrive?

By Saloni Dattani

But now imagine that you find some clever behavioural intervention — masks, hand-washing, whatever — that reduces your R by 33%, from three to two. Now, instead of giving it to 90,000 people, you’ll give it to about 2,000 people**, and about 20 of them will die.

Small reductions in the IFR lead to small reductions in deaths, and that’s good. But small reductions in R rapidly lead to very big reductions in deaths, and that’s even better. If 0.5% of a million people die instead of 1%, that’s a huge improvement, but it’s still a lot of people. Better, if reasonably possible, that they don’t get infected in the first place.

Healthcare workers, and society at large, really are better at managing the disease now than they were in April. New medical interventions, better protection, and little tricks like proning really are saving lives — possibly even JK Rowling’s, although she’s relatively young and fit so probably would have survived without proning — as, perhaps, is the fact that people are being exposed to smaller doses of the virus in the first place. 

So the reduction in the IFR is real, over and above that caused by the change in the demographic profile of people getting infected — and even that is not a coincidence, but the result of better protection of the vulnerable. But reductions in the IFR are not the real story; it’s still the R number we need to care about.

For those who wish to know:
*3+9+27+81+243+729+2,187+6,561+19,683+59,049=88,572
**2+4+8+16+32+64+128+256+512+1,024=2,046

Social media praise for the article seemed to suggest she had. “Rigorous critique and affirmative feminism,” said one tweet. “Magisterial,” said another. “Thoughtful, reflective, theoretically and historically rich,” said another. “If you’re confused about trans people and trans rights, I can’t recommend this interview with Judith Butler enough,” said Owen Jones.

I think Prof Butler deserves our attention. I don’t share the reflex sniggering at the opacity of some of her prose — sometimes complex ideas need a complex expression — and in this interview she was for the most part perfectly clear and conversational. But “magisterial”? “Theoretically and historically rich?” Not on the strength of this interview. What she had to offer was intellectually threadbare. Rather than bringing some analytical clarity, she did no more than cloak crude rhetorical strategies in academic grandiloquence.

By way of a disclaimer, I don’t say this because I’m a member of some terf-cult, and I don’t mean it as a motivated intervention in the trans wars. It seems to me that this is an area that admits of good faith disagreement, that there’s a noticeable lack of that in the public discourse, and that — even from so revered a figure as Judith Butler — we should call that lack out when we see it.

The interview began with her being asked about “how the trans rights debate has moved into mainstream culture and politics”. She responded:

“I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. If you are right to identify the one with the other, then a feminist position opposing transphobia is a marginal position. I think this may be wrong. My wager is that most feminists support trans rights and oppose all forms of transphobia. So I find it worrisome that suddenly the trans-exclusionary radical feminist position is understood as commonly accepted or even mainstream. I think it is actually a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream, and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen.”

This preoccupation with what’s mainstream and what’s marginal is just eccentric — especially coming from a theorist who has spent a lot of time, quite rightly, considering the stifling effects of normativity. Leaving aside the uninterrogated and question-begging use of loaded terms such as “transphobia” and “trans rights”, the arguments at issue should stand or fall on their merits, not on their relation to the mainstream. Liberation movements of the type Prof Butler might approve have, after all, been founded on “marginal” positions. To appeal to the mainstream is to fall into the fallacy called “argumentum ad populum”, and it’s something philosophers usually try not to do.

She’s then asked about JK Rowling’s stated concern that Self-ID could “throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman’, potentially putting women at risk of violence”:

“If we look closely at the example that you characterise as ‘mainstream’ we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry.”

Prof Butler might legitimately argue that these concerns are theoretical and/or exaggerated, as many advocates for self-ID do. One writer I respect recently tweeted: “Honestly the best ‘argument’ I have in this is nothing to do with theoretical stances on the definition of gender (which we’re never going to all agree on anyway), it’s: ‘Ireland brought in gender self-ID in 2015 and the things you are afraid of have not happened’”.

But instead there are two things going on here rhetorically, neither of which redound to Prof Butler’s credit. She is pathologising or gaslighting those on the other side of the argument (using “fantasy” or its cognates four times in a paragraph). And she is straw-manning their position.

A fairer representation of the case would have been to say: “The feminist who holds such a view presumes […] that someone with a penis could identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside.”

This would be a good-faith representation of the gender-critical position on single-sex spaces. But it would require the hard work of arguing against it on material evidence, rather than dismissing it as hysteria or fantasy.

When challenged on the idea that “terf” might be understood as a slur, she responds with a high-handed run of rhetorical questions, or what sometimes gets called epiplexis.

“I am not aware that terf is used as a slur. I wonder what name self-declared feminists who wish to exclude trans women from women’s spaces would be called? If they do favour exclusion, why not call them exclusionary? If they understand themselves as belonging to that strain of radical feminism that opposes gender reassignment, why not call them radical feminists?”

Here is something close to the etymological fallacy. As Prof Butler will surely know, given her famously subtle engagement with the eddies and currents of power in discourse, you can’t reliably nail the connotations of a term by appeal to its literal meaning. Here is an argument not much more grown-up than the person who tells you that you misuse antisemitism because “Arabs are semites too, actually”, or rejoice in having noticed that the Nazis claimed to be socialists, or who might think that because something is derived from the Latin word for black it’s no more than a neutral descriptor.

If Prof Butler is interested in attending to what we now like to call “lived experience”, she might attend to the lived experience of those who — being on the receiving end of it — very much consider “terf” to be a slur. To say words to the effect of “well, they’re trying to exclude trans women from their toilets so why not call them exclusionary? If the cap fits, wear it” will not do. If she wonders what they’d prefer to be called, why not ask them? Most, as I understand it, are happy with the term “gender-critical feminists”.

When encouraged to comment on the online trolling that the novelist JK Rowling has faced in response to her public remarks on the issue, Prof Butler responded:

“I am against online abuse of all kinds. I confess to being perplexed by the fact that you point out the abuse levelled against JK Rowling, but you do not cite the abuse against trans people and their allies that happens online and in person. I disagree with JK Rowling’s view on trans people, but I do not think she should suffer harassment and threats. Let us also remember, though, the threats against trans people in places like Brazil, the harassment of trans people in the streets and on the job in places like Poland and Romania – or indeed right here in the US. So if we are going to object to harassment and threats, as we surely should, we should also make sure we have a large picture of where that is happening, who is most profoundly affected, and whether it is tolerated by those who should be opposing it. It won’t do to say that threats against some people are tolerable but against others are intolerable.”

This seems to me to be nothing more sophisticated than garden-variety whataboutery. It’s practically a snowclone of the formulation Jeremy Corbyn used to use when asked to make a full-throated condemnation of antisemitism: namely that he condemns all kinds of racism. Immediately Prof Butler pivots from the question asked to bring up the street harassment of trans people in Poland or Romania. This is an irrelevant false equivalence. Telling JK Rowling to choke on a dick doesn’t stop trans people being harassed in Romania; and finding the former objectionable doesn’t green light the latter.

Gaslighting ad-hominems, wilful obtuseness, straw-manning, deflection and whataboutery: this is quite the catalogue of intellectual shabbiness coming from a philosopher of Prof Butler’s standing. If the supposed grown-ups in the room are debating like this, no wonder the discussion is in such a state.

“I think we are living in anti-intellectual times,” Butler remarks later in the interview. You said it, sister.

It should be stressed that cancel culture is not the exclusive preserve of the woke Left. Performative offence-taking is something that can be engaged in by persons of just about any ideological persuasion.

However, if you see a reasoned complaint about cancel culture, then it’s probably coming from a conservative or libertarian point of view. On the other side of the ‘culture war’, liberals have rather less to say about this matter.

Further reading

How US journalism lost its spine

By Michael Tracey

Which is odd, because in many ways they have more to lose. While conservatives are already alienated from modernity, and libertarians dream of a future that hasn’t happened yet, liberals are living in the world that they built. Our cultural infrastructure may have roots in pre-modernity, but today most of it is run by liberals — and has been for decades. It’s not called liberal democracy for nothing.

As radicals exploit the crisis-filled moment to continue their march through the institutions, it is liberal values that are under attack — like free speech, fairness, equality and reason.

So why aren’t the partisans of the Enlightenment rallying against the statue topplers — and the other manifestations of cancel culture? The liberal grandees of the commentariat seem remarkably unalarmed by recent events. Some of them, like Matthew Parris, in a recent piece for The Spectator, emphasise the upside.

*

At this point I should point to some honourable exceptions. For instance, impeccably liberal writers like Janice Turner of The Times who speak out against the “tiny, intolerant minority” that “is dictating public policy which the vast majority of us abhor”:

“Where will the righteous anger train stop next? When will we know that ‘progress’ is finally achieved? When every member of every public body utters the required line? When every associate of JK Rowling is shamed? When every corporation is scared into compliance?”

Turner isn’t the only one. There are others, including some who aren’t just liberal but firmly on the Left, who have taken a stand. However, they often pay a price for doing so — becoming othered and isolated from the bien pensant mainstream. The feminists smeared as ‘TERFs’, for instance. Or the defenders of academic freedom associated with Quillette magazine. Or the Remain supporters, like Caroline Flint, who resisted the undemocratic attempt to overturn the referendum result.

Though these all continue to believe the things that placed them firmly in the non-conservative camp, they’ve become defined by their dissent. That’s not because liberalism and wokeness are the same thing (they aren’t), but because liberals who expose the differences find that their fellow liberals refuse to stand with them. It’s not that such solidarity would require full agreement, just a defence of the right to disagree.

So why the passivity? It maybe that mainstream liberals perceive the woke threat to be an exaggeration — perhaps an outright invention of the populist Right. If the calling-out of bigotry does occasionally tip over into cancel culture then any excess is the work of irrelevant fringe. And, anyway, where’s the harm? Will democracy be irreparably damaged if the likes of Katie Hopkins are kicked off Twitter?

Except that cancel culture goes so much further than any of that. This issue is about what is happening within mainstream institutions — and what is being done to people with mainstream views.

Look at what happened to James Bennet, who was, until recently, a well-regarded comment editor at the New York Times. He was forced out after internal ructions a few weeks ago. The controversy was over the paper’s publication of  an op-ed by Tom Cotton, a Republican Senator. It happened at the height of the unrest in several American cities — and Cotton argued for “an overwhelming show of force” to restore order. It was a hawkish piece, but one that drew a distinction between a “majority who seek to protest peacefully” and “bands of miscreants.” Nevertheless, that was too much viewpoint diversity for the paper’s activist-employees — and Bennet had to go.

It’s not only editors who need to watch their step. Columnists too are in danger. In March, Suzanne Moore of The Guardian wrote in defence of Selina Todd, an Oxford professor who was de-platformed for wrongthink on trans issues. Moore soon found herself facing an intense campaign of criticism. This included a condemnatory letter whose signatories included several of her own Guardian colleagues. Buzzfeed News reported on a further letter, this one apparently signed by hundreds of Guardian staff. Unlike James Bennet, this insider pile-on did not force Moore out. Still one doesn’t have to achieve a full cancellation to make others think twice before defying the party line.

Further reading

Why doesn't porn ever get cancelled?

By Sarah Ditum

Not that one has to be a public figure to be targeted. Earlier this month, the Washington Post decided to run a major story (getting on for 3,000 words of it) about a fancy dress party that happened two years ago. This was deemed newsworthy because a party guest had covered her face in black make-up. According to the article, the costume was intended as a satire on people thinking that wearing blackface is OK. The guest quickly regretted her decision and apologised for it. Nevertheless she was subsequently tracked down, named and ended up losing her job. Justin Trudeau is still in his though.

Another recent example is the bizarre story of how David Shor, a political data analyst whose work has contributed to Democrat election campaigns, got cancelled. His offence? Tweeting about research by a black academic showing how, in 1968, peaceful protests increased the Democratic vote while riots reduced it. For this, he was accused by members of his professional peer group of ‘anti-blackness’ and other affronts. His employers, a progressive data analytics company, fired him — though for reasons why are disputed. You can read more about this Kafkaesque tale here and here.

Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, we’ve had the Booker Prize Foundation’s cancellation of its honorary vice-president Baroness Nicholson, (see Janice Turner’s article for more). And also Graham Linehan, of Father Ted fame, getting banned from Twitter (trans transgressions, again).

So, no, it’s not just right-wingers who get cancelled. If they do or say the wrong thing — or merely do or say it in the wrong way — progressives can also find themselves in trouble. Indeed, on the principle of pour encourager les autres, liberals make the ideal cancellees.

*

Perhaps that’s the real reason why liberals are reluctant to speak-up — they’re afraid they’ll be next. As Winston Churchill said about appeasers, “each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last”.

What can liberals do to defend liberal values while standing clear of the snapping jaws? Well, one thing they could do is to name their ‘woke breaking point’ — to state publicly how much woke is too much. Think about it in terms of statues. It’s one thing to object to a monument to a slave trader (I’d certainly hate to have one in my town), but how much further would you want either the illegal topplings or the official removals to go? Where do you say ‘thus far and no further’? Should Churchill be safe? Gandhi too? I’ll admit this is fast becoming a clichéd question, but it does demand an answer — especially from those who fancy themselves cultural arbiters.

Further reading

The disturbing history of statue-smashing

By Sean Thomas

For commentators who believe that the woke threat has been exaggerated there is surely no risk. Either they are right and their lines in the sand will never be breached — or they are wrong, in which case they’d surely want to defend their liberal values. If you use your position of influence to say that the crocodile doesn’t exist (or only eats bad people) then you shouldn’t be afraid to have some skin in the game. If the mob does come for the monuments that you said wouldn’t be toppled, or the writers that you said wouldn’t be sacked, then you should be honour-bound to take a stand.

What is dishonourable (for a self-professed liberal) is to make excuses, or stay conveniently silent, no matter how many times that liberties are encroached upon, or history erased, or language twisted out of shape, or the blatantly irrational imposed as incontestable truth.

*

Note that liberals don’t have to choose the same breaking points as their reactionary opponents. They can heartily approve of getting slave traders out of the public square or banning racist trolls from social media sites. Indeed, this isn’t only about wokeness and anti-wokeness — because not all the threats to free speech are about overtly woke issues.

For instance, in April, the CEO of YouTube announced that content contradicting the World Health Organisation advice on Covid-19 would be banned from the site. One can certainly see the wisdom in denying snake-oil salesmen a platform to peddle their wares. But equally one should see the danger of shutting down sensible debate on scientific questions that have yet to be settled. For instance, take a look at this UnHerd interview with Professor Karol Sikora. Can any true liberal be comfortable with the fact that this entirely reasonable discussion of an important issue was taken down by YouTube for “violating guidelines”? Or that the limits of allowable debate in major forums are now defined by the official line of a UN quango (which, by the way, goes against its own previously published guidance — e.g. by U-turning on the use of face coverings)?

more from this author

Why heroes should wear masks

By Peter Franklin

If a spirit of intolerance and paranoia takes hold of our most important institutions — whether in academia, the media, politics or the arts — then that, ultimately, is a threat to everyone. If you can’t find it within you to defend the rights of those you disagree with, then at least think of yourself.

“Testing is a double-edged sword,” he began, “we’ve done more testing than anybody else. Here’s the bad part. When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down please! They test and they test… we’ve got another one over here! The young man’s ten years old, he’s got the sniffles, he’ll recover in about 15 minutes. It’s a case!”

Here's Trump at his Tulsa Rally downplaying the coronavirus as the "sniffles," and admitting: "I told my people, slow the testing down!"pic.twitter.com/VOy6jsFAYI

— Bill Maxwell (@Bill_Maxwell_) June 21, 2020

It drew laughs from the audience, but condemnation from commentators, conservative and Democrat alike. Can you imagine saying something so stupid? Having already played down the need to wear a mask at his non-socially-distanced rally, at a time when multiple states are seeing alarming surges in Covid-19 case numbers, he appears both to diminish the importance of testing (which we know correlates with fewer deaths) and equate the disease with a case of “the sniffles”. Cynical. Reckless. Anti-science.

This apparent embrace of full-on Covid denialism doesn’t even seem to make sense as a political strategy. The percentage of American voters who describe themselves as “not worried at all” by coronavirus, the hard-cores, is stable at around 13% — and only 24% of Trump voters. That’s around 26 million adults: enough to half-fill a lot of stadiums over the campaign but nowhere near enough to win a general election. Add in the fact that Republican states are only now starting to get hit hard by the virus, and it seems distinctly like, having already shattered any remaining reputation he had for competence, Covid-19 will finally consign Donald Trump to electoral oblivion.

Except… what if it doesn’t? Is there a way that Covid-19 could become a net positive for Donald Trump — one that could even help carry him to re-election in November?

Suggested reading

How Trump is fixing the vote

By Justin Webb

To find out, let’s go back four years ago to Philadelphia, when Hillary Clinton formally accepted the Democratic nomination. One line of her speech, part of a central credo section setting out what she believed, was received with a particularly rapturous cheer, both in the hall and online, for days afterwards: “I believe in science,” she declared, drawing a key distinction with her opponent, who on climate and much else, apparently didn’t.

Those four words encapsulate what many Democrats passionately believe is their mission in 2020, even more so than in 2016: to keep alive the flame of Enlightenment rationality and science against the threat of fake news and a dangerous post-truth President. It is a core part of what they will be campaigning for in this election.

In 2016, of course, this framing back-fired. The internal epistemology of the Clinton campaign, with all its data and ‘evidence-led’ policy plans, was almost unfalsifiable: to reject it was to be provably either bad or stupid. But, as the eventual defeat made painfully evident, that account of truth, and the world-order that went along with it, fell short on issues like culture and identity and meaning that are just as real to many voters as economics or science. In his intuitive, brazen way, Trump targeted this weakness and gleefully promised to bring the whole tilting edifice crashing down.

In the four years since that crash, the Democrats’ claim to be the sole keepers of the flame of Enlightenment rationality has got weaker, not stronger. The intersectional identity politics that animates their activist wing — gender pronouns, cancel culture, statue-toppling — seems even less rational than in 2016. The foot-washing and genuflection accompanying the recent BLM protests (not to mention the free pass given to protestors ignoring social distancing) has only added to the atmosphere of religious fervour surrounding the progressive movement.

Suggested reading

The woke have no vision of the future

By John Gray

If anything, the language of Enlightenment rationality is now more commonly invoked by those fighting on the other side of the culture wars — in 2018 Jordan Peterson and his ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ group famously claimed it as a defence against progressive tendencies towards humbug and censorship. Last week, Peterson’s friend and fellow IDW thinker the evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad made the argument in an interview with me that in a choice between Trump and Biden, he considers Trump to be the rational choice, on the grounds of resisting the fundamentalism of social justice warriors with something like low common sense. Whether or not you like his argument, the fact that he has arrived at that point is notable.

Interview

How Covid-19 could get Trump re-elected

By Gad Saad

It might seem overgenerous to associate Donald Trump with any coherent philosophy. Elements of Paranoid Narcissism and Nietzschean will-to-power have been detected. But alongside these we should include Scepticism: a tendency to question things that orthodoxy holds to be unquestionably true. This is itself a key strand of Enlightenment thought, and represents an allegiance to doubt that progressive idealists are distinctly less interested in, with their righteous certainties and plans to remake the world from first principles. Of course you can have too much Scepticism – some climate-sceptics, Euro-sceptics, Covid-sceptics are no longer rationally scrutinising and are simply following a different faith — but you can also have too little, and the progressive side of recent culture wars is vulnerable to that charge. Trump’s Scepticism has been politically effective.

So we entered this weird election cycle with both sides, if not necessarily the candidates themselves, already making different claims to be the defenders of common sense, keepers of the flame of Enlightenment rationality in a world gone mad.

Against this background, Covid-19 erupted. The different attitudes quickly started aligning with the political parties: Democratic governors were much more activist in response, issuing blanket stay at home orders (although it was primarily Democratic states that were initially hit), while Republican governors took their lead from a sceptical and chaotic President and have generally tried to minimise restrictions.

It is not yet clear exactly where, between these two poles, wisdom lies. While it is right to accuse the President and some Republicans of nonchalance and inconsistency, the progressives have been guilty of the same didacticism and lack of humility that put voters off last time. The official IHME models and forecasts, produced with all the spurious precision and data-richness that graduate progressives find so enthralling, have been woefully wide of the mark; arguments in favour of a more moderate policy response have been dismissed as irresponsible anti-science (with censorship duly enforced by the tech platforms); and states have rushed to close schools and other parts of society before evidence has proved them to be vectors of the disease (even the Norwegian prime minister now says she regrets closing schools). On these points and many more, while claiming the language of science, progressives have shown a shortage of, even hostility to, scientific scepticism.

Interview

How Covid-19 could get Trump re-elected

By Camilla Stoltenberg

So although Trump’s speech in Tulsa was typically free-wheeling and borderline incoherent, the target of his lampooning was well chosen. He is right that the emphasis on case numbers is misleading, as they are entirely contingent on testing (Oxford’s Prof Sunetra Gupta made the same complaint to us) so while many states have seen surges in case numbers, we have not generally seen surges in numbers of deaths (and the overall daily deaths continue to fall nationwide). He’s also right that for children Covid-19 is a very minor disease and often symptomless — and that the relative safety of anyone under retirement age has been bizarrely downplayed by the liberal media which sees its responsibility as only reinforcing the risks. This is fertile territory for Trump, even more so for its capability to outrage everybody.

If (and, yes, it’s a big if) the apparent second surges of Covid-19 turn out to be not too bad and overall deaths continue to decline over the summer, and if there is no big second spike in October, then Donald Trump’s scepticism would likely become more acceptable — and popular — as the months go by. Right now, only 13% of Americans are ‘not worried at all’ by the virus. But, equally, only 21% are ‘very worried’: that’s a lot of people in between, and they would surely become more relaxed if the pandemic dwindles.

An election campaign culminating in September and October in which Democrat voices are endlessly finger-wagging and calling for further restrictions, six months after the peak and with deaths right down, while Trump is promising freedom and a return to the ‘old normal’, sounds like a fight he is aching to have. Not even Make America Great Again – just Make America Normal Again.

As it stands, Trump sounds increasingly unhinged, is facing a tanking economy and couldn’t look less like a president who is about to be re-elected. But it’s worth bearing in mind that if the pandemic goes his way, Covid-19 could just about turn from being the thing that killed off his presidency into a re-animating mission that goes to the heart of Democrat epistemological overreach and puts him squarely back in the game.

Well, thanks to my seven year old daughter, I’ve just reread all one million words of the Harry Potter novels, and I can tell you that Lord Voldemort is not defeated by facts, reason or elite education. He’s defeated by love. Call this saccharine, by all means. Call it derivative. But don’t call it neoliberalism.

I count seven occasions when love – or an allied emotion like compassion, or loyalty – is instrumental in saving Harry and undermining the noseless supervillain. And zero occasions on which facts or reason are the deciding factor – and don’t contradict me by mentioning the puzzles the children solve to reach the Philosopher’s Stone, because those were put there by the teachers. When it comes to defeating evil, it’s emotion that matters.

Suggested reading

Could true neoliberalism save the West?

By Henry Olsen

As for celebrating the power of elite education, well, I accept that the books are mostly set at a school, and a selective one at that. But two of our three heroes are bad at their lessons and get pretty shocking grades. Harry, who saves the world, is a dreadful student. He cheats at Potions. He is hopeless at Occlumency. He flunks Divination.

And all three of them – even super-brain Hermione – literally drop out of school a year before graduation to save the world. Even the musical Grease pushes the establishment view that your life will be a disaster if you leave school early. Harry Potter says dropouts can save the world.

And of course, it is wandlore – the impenetrably complex interactions between wands, and their relationships with their masters – that finally defeats Voldemort. This is put forward as an area of magical study in which the word “guess” is as good as it gets: a magic so deep it is beyond the reach of study or education, no matter how elite.

Suggested reading

This age of semiotics is breaking us

By Graeme Archer

RJ goes deeper, though. He argues that the very concept of magic is a neoliberal fantasy of meritocracy: an elite have access to a special power, which gives them the right to rule.

Now I have never met JK Rowling but I’m guessing she’s at least dimly aware of this, given that the central conflict of her stories is the question of whether magical power confers the right to rule. The bad guys think it does. The good guys say it doesn’t. And just in case you don’t get the message that elites shouldn’t oppress others, there’s endless detail about how wrong it is for wizards to subjugate other magical creatures, from giants to goblins.

The most important thing to recognise is that the politics of these books is laid on with a trowel. They’re children’s books, so it’s no surprise, but the morality lessons come thick and fast, and they’re barely more subtle than an Aesop’s fable. It ought to be impossible to read Harry Potter novels and say they portray “facts” and “elite education” as the answer to all problems.

And yet it isn’t impossible. RJ, and all those who widely shared and loudly cheered his article, prove it can be done, not just once but by thousands of people. And that’s because partisanship rots the brain.

Suggested reading

Seeing the funny side of censorship

By Andrew Watts

The hard Left has decided that it hates JK Rowling because she doesn’t support Jeremy Corbyn. Not supporting Jeremy Corbyn is essentially the same thing as being a neoliberal. And, therefore, the works of JK Rowling must be neoliberal propaganda.

This skewing of the mind to be biased against an author you hate is not conscious. The neuroscientific work of Drew Westen showed that politically aligned people use their emotions, not their reason, to respond to politics. When presented with contradictory statements by their own ‘side’, the partisans explained them away, with fMRI scans showing activity only in the emotional parts of the brain. As Westen says “partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want.”

And this matters. It matters when one side can’t even read a work of fiction by its opponent without disconnecting the basic functions of logic in their mind. No wonder everyone believes the BBC is biased against them, when the moment a political opponent is up on screen, their rational brain switches off. No wonder we can’t resolve the problem of Brexit, when both sides assume everything said by the other is malicious and wrong.

More from this author

Why should a life without faith be without meaning?

By Polly Mackenzie

Our instincts make mistakes all the time. We shouldn’t be ashamed to use facts and reason to question the judgement of our eyes or our guts. Use your eyes and the world looks flat. Use reason and you’ll accept that it is not.

I’ve even used facts and reason here to prove that Harry Potter isn’t a celebration of facts and reason. And I’m unashamed to say that my argument is better than RJ’s because I could write a 19-page version of this article with footnotes to spare, where he’d be stumped to go beyond ‘because I said so’.

I don’t care how much you like Harry Potter. I don’t care how much you like JK Rowling. I care only that you recognise they are not the same thing. Our inability to look beyond the messenger and consider the value of the message is destroying our political system. How can you achieve anything but deadlock when you won’t even listen to your opponent’s ideas with an open mind?

Perhaps you’re one of the good guys. You try to get out of your bubble and read ideas by people with whom you disagree. Well next time, do yourself a favour. Stick a picture and a byline of your favourite writer at the top. Maybe then you’ll be able to trick your brain into giving an opponent’s idea a fair chance.