Naomi Kanakia, for example, probably doesn’t want me — a religious-minded, gender-critical writer — to review her book, What’s So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though it Might Destroy You), published on Tuesday. The book is a defense of the classics, written for the Left, and it has agonizingly cringe chapter headings such as “Aren’t the Great Books kinda problematic?” In it, Kanakia trots out all the usual progressive objections to the canon, including that Western novels can psychologically damage marginalized people, and that to say you like Great Books can be read as an endorsement of white men (the horror). The biggest problem with the great books, though, is the people who read them: Right-wingers, religious people, racists, and transphobes. 

Kanakia is a literary critic and author of several young-adult novels, and she writes the excellent literary Substack Woman of Letters. This book sprung out of a lifetime self-improvement (and enjoyment) project in which she read her way through most of a legendary “Great Books” list, The New Lifetime Reading Plan, by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major. The process changed her life and her tastes, set her on a rigorous program of reading a wider range of classics, and had unexpected results (the promise to “destroy you” in the title is joking, but the books will change you, she cautions). In her case, several years spent reading the 18-book-long Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata, one of the longest epic poems in world literature, caused her, a secular American of Indian origin, to begin finding something “deeply true” in Hinduism; her Substack has mentioned that she now goes to temple. 

However, “the main reason I have trouble endorsing the Great Books is that so many transphobes also love them,” Kanakia writes. She is trans, and “transphobes” in her estimation include people who imagine trans rights are complicated, and those who feel that trans rights might be “up for debate.” (A note on pronouns: it has always been my belief that the usage of transgender pronouns is the provenance of the speaker, and should be decided as a relational matter between individuals. Despite Kanakia’s probable feelings about gender critics like me, a few years ago I had a friendly exchange with her on X, formerly Twitter, and I will refer to her as “her.”) 

All this would appear to be a political gulf too vast to navigate, and What’s So Great About the Great Books? would appear to be a niche product for a niche audience. But it is actually much more. In the same way Kanakia does not want people on the Left to miss out on the Great Books because of their politics, I do not want people on the Right to miss out on her great book because of their politics. 

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The topic of what books we should be reading and teaching is obviously a cultural flashpoint, with the “diversity” versus “tradition” camps well established, and horror stories abounding. Most recently, a professor at Stanford went public with the complaint that the university’s three-course general-education requirement includes, “with the partial exception of Frankenstein,” no literary classics in the Western liberal tradition. In addition, the Stanford scholar complained, “the syllabus assigns roughly 45 pages of canonical Western philosophical writing across the entire quarter, against more than 500 pages of contemporary work organized around identity, oppression, and indigenous ways of knowing.” These latter books, he says, are eminently skippable: “if these courses were electives, I would not recommend them; I would tell students to seek out the best courses Stanford offers in the humanities instead.” 

This trend in education, and the backlash against the trend, make Kanakia’s topic of vital significance to anyone interested in culture and education in America. If we want a return to the classics, what do we even mean? What are the Great Books? (They are a concept invented by a president of Harvard in the early 20th century, she tells us, which was only popularized in the 1930s; there’s no definitive list.) Is reading the Great Books really a return to ancient or classical tradition? (No, the classical tradition was almost exclusively to study Greek and Latin; popular-novel-reading represents a withering of tradition.) And can we really say any book is “great” in some kind of objective, existential way, or does that depend on the reader? (We actually can say so, though personal choice is always relevant, too.) 

Kanakia’s treatment of these subjects is wonderfully illuminating. And the extreme skepticism with which she approaches the concept gives her conclusion — that she loves these books; and that they are worth reading —  a beautiful force. What she’s really doing is taking on the haters of the Western canon, giving their arguments the strongest and most sympathetic possible interpretation, and then defeating them. The treatment should be highly satisfying for any lover of literature. 

For instance, in the chapter “Why not read other books that are equally beautiful but have better politics?,” Kanakia demolishes the idea that it’s possible for a book to be great and also politically correct. “If you’re asking for a book that can only be read as supporting one politically correct viewpoint, then you’re asking for a book that is lacking precisely the quality that makes the Great Books so great,” she writes. In any truly great book, she argues, the author has engaged courageously with thorny “moral, ethical, political and spiritual questions on the deepest and most rigorous level,” which means they have engaged with situations that are legitimately complicated, and they have portrayed the complexity. In her lovely phrase, she promises you’ll often see “the ghosts of other answers” within whatever answer a book produces. Authorial willingness to take on such fearless exploration is “integrity,” in her word, and it is the quality that more than any other defines a Great Book.

This is a reasonably good description of Kanakia’s own method. She is one of the best critics and literary Substackers around, and both are professions that require a person to be able see (or read) something and form an original opinion — not the consensus opinion, not an opinion you learned in school, but an opinion of your own. She has a rare talent for this, and also a rare talent for erudition without pretension. Her piece on New Yorker fiction is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the literary landscape today. Her willingness to take on establishment hits is estimable. And What’s So Great About the Great Books?, itself, is brave given her milieu and the cultural circumstances. 

Kanakia’s list starts with the Epic of Gilgamesh, and ends in 1958 with Things Fall Apart. It was originally published in 1960, but the new, revised version she is working from, published in 1997, offers an edited selection that includes more works of world literature. She took a casual, pragmatic approach, reading out-of-order, starting with works she considered easiest (in the same order I’d choose myself; maybe we all know “easy” when we see it): American realists and modernists, then British realists and modernists, then 19th century, then Russian …. The hard stuff — epics, philosophy, Old and Middle English and poetry — came last. 

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She doesn’t discuss particular works, except in the few cases she uses a text to make one of her larger points about reading and greatness. Her reading of Proust, for example, serves as the anecdotal material for a discussion of taste: what pleasure is she getting from this difficult-to-read book, she asks, and how does that pleasure differ from the pleasures of an unquestionably simpler one? Or, for another example, a snippet of Old English poetry is used to illustrate a point about diversity: when dealing with vast differences in time, to insist on racial diversity is essentialist and reductive. “It seems rather arbitrary to say that one people, the Anglo-Saxons, were white and therefore more similar to us, whereas another, the Chinese, were a different race and hence very different from us and more worthy of our study.” 

Throughout, she pulls in other writers and thinkers — Husserl on the “lifeworld” or Kant on the limits of human reason, for example — with a truly unusual and admirable simplicity and clarity. Kanakia may be a critic and a professional, but she is first and foremost a reader, and the book’s ultimate thesis is that the Great Books are for everyone — or can be.

It’s a shame, then, that her view of trans rights issues, and of the conservative and religious enemy is one of the few places she does seem unwilling to see complexity. She writes critically about Hillsdale College, a Christian institution that requires the classics of the Western canon as part of its core curriculum, because it “has a history of opposing LGBTQ rights and discriminating against LGBTQ students.” That she’s writing about Hillsdale at all is, in one sense, an example of her integrity and clarity of vision. She’s determined to speak the truth, including that the books she loves are championed by the Right. (“Is it really so surprising that they’d love Anna Karenina?” she asks. “Of course not … it’s an explicitly Christian book!”) 

But in another sense, the greater integrity would be admitting that, obviously, there is a debate over trans rights, and that people, including religious people, might have reasons for this that are more complex than “transphobia” — a fake word, used to simplify and demonize your opponent and win an argument, and thus not a word worthy of a great book.  

The Times got around to mentioning Westman’s gender identity only halfway through the story, carefully framed by the information that “conservative activists” on social media would use the data to portray transgender people as violent or mentally ill. Other mainstream liberal news outlets have treated the issue in a similar manner. A BBC News story described the shooting as an “anti-Catholic hate crime” and avoided pronouns altogether.

Westman killed two children and injured 14 more children and three adults, who were attending an opening-of-school Mass at at Annunciation Catholic School, where his mother until recently worked. Like all such shooters, he became contested terrain in the culture wars the minute he opened fire. The most obvious battleground is his transgenderism. Mainstream outlets like the Times, operating for the defense, have elected to suppress the trans angle. Minneapolis’s progressive mayor, Jacob Frey, chose to get out in front, speaking out at a news conference against transgender hate and in favor of gun control. The Right-of-center New York Post, meanwhile, took what the gender activists no doubt saw as a gleeful opportunity for trans-bashing, with the headline “Minneapolis school shooter confessed he was ‘tired of being trans’: ‘I wish I never brain-washed myself.’”

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Without avoiding the shooter’s trans-ness or blaming it, however, we might instead acknowledge that the transgender mass shooter is uniquely telling of the mass-shooting phenomenon, and of our times. The Westman crime happens in the same month as an excellent article by Sam Kriss in The Point magazine. It locates March 30, 1981, as the moment “John Hinckley brought us into the world we all live in today. He did it by firing a .22 ‘Devastator’ round into the chest of the president of the United States.”

Kriss argues that Hinckley’s attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan was the first such event to divorce the target from the goal. In 1981, Americans responded to an act of public violence by worrying about “things that used to matter,” such as who was in charge of the country, and if the shooting was a Russia-designed first stage of a nuclear attack. But the real story was elsewhere, in proto-incel Hinckley’s frustrated masculinity and desire for self-expression. Hinckley wasn’t political (and Westman, with his confused jumble of signifiers, isn’t political in any meaningful sense either). The cultural shorthand is that Hinckley, inspired by Taxi Driver, shot Reagan in order to impress Jodie Foster, who starred in the Scorsese film. But Kriss contends that this merely conceals the seismic event of a young man discovering “the door through which you can walk right out of the world and into eternity.”

Mass shootings allow the perpetrator to achieve the ultimate modern currency of selfhood — celebrity. “If you want to make yourself visible to the apparatus of electronic media,” Kriss writes, “you don’t need to be good at the guitar. You don’t need to sing. You don’t even need to drink the same peach brandy as a Scorsese character. All you need to do is kill and die.”

It’s true, but celebrity is fracturing these days, and Westman’s actions may be less about achieving fame and more about simply achieving something — a concrete, visible and indubitable accomplishment in a world in which young men are increasingly at sea. The action must happen on camera to exist, that’s a given, but it’s no longer about the camera, it’s about imposing and expressing himself, about making himself, finally, matter. This is not to say that the victims of the crime don’t matter in the real scale of things. Of course, they do. But they didn’t matter to Westman.

There’s nothing more male than a mass shooter. Demographically, they are overwhelmingly white, disenfranchised, isolated, young, angry, too online, caught up in paranoias and fringe causes, living with Mom and Dad, have failed to launch, are total losers. The Kriss piece refers to Hinckley as “Mr. Toxic Shock,” allegedly because this was the nickname Foster and her roommates at Yale gave him (he was so unfuckable that you’d go into toxic shock if you tried it). Westman fits perfectly, and the “mystery” of his motivations is no mystery at all. Attempts to attach him to the Left or the Right, a Trump-hater or a Satanist, are irrelevant. It’s perhaps slightly less irrelevant that he worked for a cannabis dispensary and had claimed on social media that the weed was driving him insane. “I cannot control myself, and have been destroying my body through vaping and other means,” he wrote in a journal page circulating on social media.

Nonetheless, the motivation is the condition itself: a man experiencing the complete failure of masculinity. Westman does not represent all trans people any more than mass shooters represent all men, but a transwoman, both by choice and definition, is also a very sad man. In this quintessentially gendered crime, “she” as a perpetrator was inevitable.

So what should we do about the pronouns? Noah Rothman of National Review posted on X that since “honorifics” are withheld from convicted criminals, “denying attempted mass child murderers their preferred pronouns should be similarly observed.” From one viewpoint, the suggestion is an erosion of trans rights and Rothman is just being an evil conservative. Then again, excluding men like Westman — who are experiencing, fundamentally a crisis of masculinity — from the ranks of women, trans or otherwise, doesn’t seem like such a terrible idea.

Once upon a time, a fully realised person was something one became. Entailing education, observation, experimentation, and sometimes humiliation, “coming of age” was hard work. When the project succeeded, we developed a gradually richer understanding of what it means to be human and what constitutes a fruitful life. This ongoing project was halted only by death. Maturity was the result of accumulated experience (some of it dire) and much trial and error (both comical and tragic), helping explain why wisdom, as opposed to intelligence, was mostly the preserve of the old. We admired the “self-made man”, because character was a creation — one constructed often at great cost. Many a “character-building” adventure, such as joining the Army, was a trial by fire.

These days, discussion of “character” is largely relegated to fiction workshops and film reviews. Instead, we relentlessly address “identity”, a hollowed-out concept now reduced to membership of the groups into which we were involuntarily born — thereby removing all choice about who we are. Rejecting the passé “character building” paradigm, we now inform children that their selves emerge from the womb fully formed. Their sole mission is to tell us what those selves already are. Self is a prefabricated house to which only its owner has a key.

This is not an essay about transgenderism per se. Nevertheless, our foundational text is excerpted from Christopher Rufo’s September 2022 comment, “Concealing Radicalism”, which quotes adolescents from a TikTok video on gender assembled by Michigan’s education department:

“I am a triple threat: I’m depressed, anxious, and gay.”

“Last night at about 2am, I put in my bio that I identify as ‘agender’, which is different than non-binary because non-binary is like neither gender, right? Agender is like the grey area between genders.”

“Hi, my name is Elise. I’ve used she/her pronouns all my life. But recently, and for a while, I’ve been struggling with gender issues as well as a whole lot of other identity things. So, I finally gave in and ordered a [breast] binder for myself and it just came in today.”

“A rational observer might suspect,” Rufo notes, “that these youths are in a state of confusion or distress, but rather than explore this line of reasoning, the education department.,, promote a policy of immediate and unconditional affirmation.” He quotes Kim Phillips-Knope, leader of the LBGTQ+ Students Project: “Kids have a sense of their gender identity between the ages of three and five, so about the time that kids have language, they can start to share with us whether they’re a boy or a girl — usually those are the only things that they will identify as, because those are the only options we’ve given them.” He adds: “In response to a teacher who asked how to respond to a student in her classroom who claims to have ‘she/he/they/them’ pronouns, Amorie [a staff trainer] responded adamantly: ‘Go with what the kid says. They’re the best experts on their lives. They’re the best experts on their own identities and their own bodies.’”

I further submit: throwing kids who just got here on their own investigative devices — refusing to be of any assistance aside from “affirming” whatever they whimsically claim to be; folding our arms and charging, “So who are you? Only you know” — is child abuse.

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By Hadley Freeman

The idea that your psyche is set from birth is intrinsically deterministic and therefore grim. The vision it conjures is fatalistic and mechanical: all these traits are hardwired, and life involves winding up the clockwork toy and watching it totter across the floor until it runs into the wainscotting. If a newly emerged self already exists in its entirety, there’s nothing to do. In contrast to becoming, being is an inert affair.

We haven’t given these young people a job. Contemporary education strenuously seeks to assure students they’re already wonderful. Teachers are increasingly terrified of imposing any standards that all their wards will not readily meet, so everyone gets a gold star. The Virginia school district of the once-renowned Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology now aims for “equal outcomes for every student, without exception”. A pedagogical emphasis on student “self-esteem” became dislocated from “esteem for doing something” decades ago. Why should any of these kids get out of bed? No wonder they’re depressed.

Minors don’t know anything, which is not their fault. We didn’t know anything at their age, either (and may not still), though we thought we did — and being disabused of callow, hastily conceived views and coming to appreciate the extent of our ignorance is a prerequisite for proper education. Yet we now encourage young people to look inward for their answers and to trust that their marvellous natures will extemporaneously reveal themselves. With no experience to speak of and no guidance from adults, all that many kids will find when gawking at their navels is pyjama fluff. Where is this mysterious entity to whose nature I alone am privy?

There’s nothing shameful about being an empty vessel when you haven’t done anything and nothing much has happened to you yet. Telling children, “Of course you don’t know who you are! Growing up is hard, full of false starts, and all about making something of yourself. Don’t worry, we’ll give you lots of help” is a great deal more consoling than the model of the ready-meal self. We demand toddlers determine whether they’re “girls or boys or something in-between” before they have fully registered what a girl or boy is, much less “something in-between”. Placing the total onus for figuring out how to negotiate being alive on people who haven’t been given the user’s manual is a form of abandonment.

Adults have an obligation to advise, comfort, and inform — to provide the social context that children have none of the resources to infer and to help form expectations of what comes next.  Instead, we’re throwing kids helplessly on their primitive imaginations. The first time I remember being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I clearly remember answering, “a bear”. I wasn’t trying to be a wiseass. I just wasn’t up to speed on the ambitions to which I was expected to aspire. Little wonder that kids are now “identifying” as cats. Next, they will be identifying as electric lawnmowers, and we will have asked for it.

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This notion of the pre-made self is asocial, if not anti-social. It separates personhood from lineage, heritage, culture, history, and even family. You are already everything you were ever meant to be, never mind where, what and whom you come from. But seeing selfhood as floating in a vacuum is a recipe for loneliness, vagueness, insecurity and anxiety.

By contrast, a self constructed brick by brick over a lifetime has everything to do with other people. The undertaking involves the assembly of tastes and enthusiasms, the formation of friendships and institutional affiliations, participation in joint projects, and the development of perceptions not simply of one’s interior nature but of the outside world. Character that is rooted in ties to other people is likely to be more solid and enduring. The elderly are most in danger of desolation when they’ve outlived their friends and relatives. Who I am partially comprises decades-long friendships, my colleagues, my fierce devotion to my younger brother, a complex allegiance to two different Anglophone countries, and a rich cultural inheritance from my predecessors.

In my teens, we employed the word “identity” quite differently. We thought having an “identity” meant not only being at home in our own skins, but also having at least a hazy notion of what we wanted to do with our lives. It meant connecting with the likeminded (I found kindred spirits in my junior-high Debate Club). An “identity” was fashioned less from race or sexual orientation than from the discovery of which albums we loved, which novels we ritually reread because they spoke to us, which causes we supported, which subjects interested us, and which didn’t. It meant figuring out what we were good at (I was good at maths, but in second-year calculus I hit a wall) and what we couldn’t stand (me, team sports). Identity was fused with purpose: I knew I was drawn to writing, the visual arts, and political activism (the latter making me rather tiresome).

We were as self-involved in our determination to be individuals as Gen Z, but that particularity was commonly assembled from the cultural smorgasbord of other people and what they’d thought and made: Kurt Vonnegut or William Faulkner, Catch-22 or The Winds of War, Simon and Garfunkel or Iron Butterfly, hostile or gung-ho positions on Vietnam. Naturally this is a version of identity subject to change. That’s the point. It’s supposed to change. I no longer listen to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

The self is not found but made, because meaning is made. Rather than be unearthed like buried treasure, meaning is laboriously created, often by doing hard things. I cringe a bit recalling the person I was in my twenties, because she represented an early stage of an ongoing project that I have modified much in the years since. My twenties were an early draft of a manuscript whose sentences I have revised, pruned, and qualified. Ideally, if I keep forcing myself to do hard things — take on the premise of a novel that at first I have no idea how to execute, move to still another country, cultivate new friendships — the later drafts of my eternally incomplete manuscript will be more captivating. I would arguably be a fuller person had I done the very hardest thing — having children — but as a not-half-bad second best, I have committed to a marriage of 20 years and counting and thus to a man who moors me. Only death will part us.

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Of course, in constantly reforming and refining who we are, we can lose aspects of ourselves from earlier drafts that we should have kept. I no longer dance alone for hours in the sitting room, and I miss that abandon. For years I crafted ceramic figure sculpture, and I’m not sure that substituting journalism as my primary side-line to fiction writing constituted an improvement. Towards the very end of our lives, many of us will drop pretty much every paragraph we ever added, and we’ll go from novel to pamphlet.

Nevertheless, given the choice I’d prefer to spend time with me in the present than with me at 35. I know more (although what I learn now has trouble keeping up with what I forget), my sense of humour is sharper, and rather to my surprise I’m humbler. I’ve more perspective; while that perspective is often bleak, that very bleakness — a gleeful bleakness — can be entertaining. I’m not as neurotic about what I weigh, and I am more generous, both in relation to contemporaries and younger aspirants. I’m less concerned with my professional status, and I think much more about death (which is torturous but intelligent). Some of this profitable evolution was effortlessly organic, but much has issued from a challenging career, the fruit of taking a big risk in my youth that’s paid off.

Clearly, some aspects of character, of self, are determined from the off. I’d never have become a nuclear physicist no matter how hard I tried. But the conventional “nature versus nurture” opposition still eliminates agency: you act mindlessly as whatever you were born as, or you are submissively acted upon. Where on this nature-nurture continuum does the object of all this theorising have a say in the outcome? I’m leery of venturing into the prickly no-go of sexual orientation. Yet while I’m open to the idea that some people are born gay, choices can affect what gets you off. We hear repeatedly from big consumers of online pornography that their tastes begin to change, and it takes more and more extreme videos to become aroused, until actual humans in real life will no longer do the trick. Watching porn is a choice. Even sexual proclivities exhibit some plasticity.

Following the modern script, 14-year-olds have learned never to say, “I’ve decided to be trans”, because all my friends are trans and I feel left out, but always, “I’ve discovered that I am trans”. This passive, powerless version of self has implications. We’re telling young people that what they see is what they get — that they already are what they will ever be. How disheartening. What a bore. Whatever is there to look forward to? Many victims of this formulation of existence, which apparently requires little of them besides all that being, must reach inside themselves and come up empty-handed. At the direction of the sort of educational authority Chris Rufo quoted above, they’ve undertaken a psychic archaeological dig, only to be left with a pit. So they feel cheated. Or inadequate. Convinced that they alone among their peers exhumed nothing but a disposable cigarette lighter.

By withholding the assurance, “Don’t worry about not knowing who you are; you’re just not grown up yet, and neither are we, because growing up isn’t over at 18 or 21 but is something you do your whole life through”, we are cultivating self-hatred, disillusionment, bewilderment, frustration, and fury. Young women often turn their despair inward — hence the high rates of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and cutting. Young men are more apt to project the barrenness of their interior lives onto the rest of the world and take their disappointment out on everyone else.

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In a trenchant essay last autumn, “Mass Shootings and the World Liberalism Made”, Katherine Dee seeks a deeper explanation for the mass murders committed by disaffected young men, whose blind rage and misanthropy now express themselves in the US at a rate of twice per day.  Gun proliferation, Dee claims, is not the core driver. Rather, “we have a nihilism problem”. The videos left behind by the Sandy Hook child killer Adam Lanza suggest a belief that “even if we could free our ‘feral selves’ from the shackles of modern norms, there would be nothing underneath. Just blackness. A great gaping hole. For many mass shooters, the only reasonable response to this hole is death — the complete extermination of life. Not just theirs.”

According to Dee, all these atrocities have hailed from “a world where everything revolved around the individual”. The result is narcissism, which “is expressed through our perpetual identity crises, where chasing an imaginary ‘true self’ keeps us busy and distracted. We see it in the people who use their phones and computers like they’re prosthetic selves, who are always there, but never present, gazing endlessly at their own reflection in the pond.”

An authentic sense of self commonly involves not thinking about who you are, because you’re too busy doing something else. It is inextricably linked to, if not synonymous with, a sense of meaning. Nihilism, an oxymoronic belief in the impossibility of believing anything, can prove literally lethal. Young men who feel no personal sense of purpose are inclined to perceive that nothing else has a purpose, either. They don’t just hate themselves; they hate everybody. In telling people who’ve been on the planet for about ten minutes that they already know who they are, and that they’re already wonderful, we’re inciting that malign, sometimes homicidal nihilism. Because they don’t feel wonderful. They’re not undertaking any project but, according to the adults, inertly embody a completed project, which means the status quo is as good as it gets — and the status quo isn’t, subjectively, very good.

Transgenderism may have grown so alluring to contemporary minors not only because it promises a new “identity”, but because it promises a process. Transforming from caterpillar to butterfly entails a complex sequence of social interventions and medical procedures that must be terribly engrossing. Transitioning is a project. Everyone needs a project. Embracing the trans label gifts the self with direction, with a task to accomplish. Ironically, the contagion expresses an inchoate yearning for the cast-off paradigm whereby character is built.

We should stop telling children that they’re the “experts on their own lives” and repudiate a static model of selfhood as a fait accompli at birth. Sure, some inborn essence is particular to every person, but it’s a spark; it’s not a fire. We could stand to return to the language of forming character and making a life for yourself, while urging teachers to exercise the guidance they’ve been encouraged to forsake.

As we age, we’re not only that unique essence in the cradle, but the consequence of what we’ve read, watched, and witnessed; whom we’ve loved and what losses we’ve suffered; what mistakes we’ve made and which we’ve corrected; where we’ve lived and travelled and what skills we’ve acquired; not only what we’ve made of ourselves but what we’ve made outside of ourselves; most of all, what we’ve done. That is an exciting, active version of “identity” whose work is never finished, full of choice, enlivened by agency, if admittedly freighted with responsibility and therefore a little frightening. But it at least provides young people something to do, other than mass murder or gruesome elective surgery.

It was 2001. The writer and the monarch were standing in the White Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace, at an event to celebrate British publishing.

“Yes of course I remember,” the Queen said sharply.

“Well I was the person who brought the news back from Everest, so you got it on time.”

The Queen looked at Morris in silence. Before her stood a properly large lady — a 6ft 4” lady, with wispy white hair harassing a square head. A fascinating, but somewhat odd face. A correct Englishwoman’s voice, but sultry, with a male pitch. A laugh like a cat’s laugh, hissy and languid. And a lady. Were there ladies on Everest, in 1953?

Morris did not explain to the Queen that she had undergone gender reassignment surgery in the decades since the mountain was defeated. “How could I explain to her?” she later said. “Life is too short.”

How to explain Jan Morris? Who was she? What was she? Faced with a life like this, the Queen’s confusion is our own. Morris was a man, and then a woman. He had been a debonair foreign correspondent as the jet age dawned, who transformed into an apparently cheerful old dear wearing pearls in a damp corner of North Wales. He was a superb travel writer who yearned to compose novels, then wrote the Pax Britannica trilogy, the greatest — or at least the most entertaining — narrative history of the late 20th century instead.

She was a trickster who denied the existence of truth, then struggled to have her female identity accepted by her family, her profession, and her society. She wanted to be a raffish romancer, but was “happily married” for 70 years. She hymned British Imperialism, then became a Welsh Nationalist. She was described as an enigma, yet underwent the least enigmatic voluntary medical procedure possible. Her public persona was all bonhomie, but she lived alongside her own gravestone; it haunted the corner of her library for decades. Every time she said she had retired, she resurfaced scant months later with a new book — even after she died in 2020, there she was again, a little while later, with another one. There were 58 of them in the end. More than anything, she was a flirt, a tease. “My life is one long allegory,” Morris claimed. To which the reply, inevitably, is: for what?

Jan Morris was born James Morris in the Somerset seaside town of Clevedon in 1926. His father’s family was Welsh, his mother’s vaguely Norman — division was established as an early theme. The young boy wandered the hills overlooking the coast near his home, already isolated, already convinced “I had been born in the wrong body, and should really be a girl”, already yearning for the unobtainable. Then the miseries of school (Lancing College), where he was always in trouble, “beaten by prefects more than any other pupil” during the early months of the war. As the conflict wound down, Morris joined the 9th Lancers, serving in Venice, Trieste, and Cairo as an intelligence officer, undertaking what she called “squalid duties of repression and withdrawal”.

In 1953, Morris, at 27 the new foreign editor of The Times, became the official journalist on Edmund Hillary’s expedition to Everest. Breaking the news that Hillary had conquered the mountain made Morris’s career. He was a classic, frenzied overachiever. Celebrated books followed, such as Venice (1960), and the sex-change memoir, Conundrum (1974). These are the room temperature facts, diligently recorded by Paul Clements in his new biography, Jan Morris: Life from both sides. 

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The many deaths of Virginia Woolf

By Will Lloyd

You have to feel sorry for Clements. He was friendly with his subject, which is dangerous for a biographer. Morris destroyed her private papers, and lived, at times, as if existence itself was an inside joke. “Almost nothing in life is what it seems”, she wrote, and we would do well to apply this mantra to Morris’s own life. She claims she knew she was a woman when she was three or four years old — yet she pursued emphatically manly careers in the army and the press. She claimed an ambiguous sexuality — but when she met her wife, Elizabeth, Clements notes that “any questions about gender and sexuality were swept aside”. Five children, one of whom died, followed. The marriage was a perfect patriarchal model: Morris away obsessively working the globe; Elizabeth tending children, garden, accounts and house, alone. “Jan,” said her daughter Suki, “was a very complicated person, not in my view, the simple, lovely being that people see at all”. Nothing was what it seemed. All Clements will say is that she had a “contradictory nature”.

Morris began taking oestrogen pills in 1964, the first stage of an eight-year physical metamorphosis. She had been near-suicidal in the run up to this decision. And at the very moment her identity as a man was crumbling, her country was too. What did James Morris see when he looked around in 1964? He had been born at a time when Britain still decided world questions, and he had always approved of this. Now God was withdrawing His credit from the British. After Everest, Morris was a foreign correspondent for the Guardian. He filed from Cape Town and Bogota, from Cairo and Kabul, from Tel Aviv and Isfahan. He had followed Britain’s armies through the long, bleary rearguard action of imperialism. He had watched that “distasteful ignominy” at Suez. “We were living in a twilight time,” Morris wrote. “Old forces were dying and new energies emerging. Patterns that had seemed permanent were falling into chaos.”

Everywhere was retreat and evacuation. The Promethean spirit — “Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life,” the spirit used to whisper — that executed Mughal princes without trial, that snaked railways underneath Rhodesian waterfalls, that doomed prisoners to silent wards on the frigid shores of the Tasman Sea, that Empire-building spirit, was gone. Things would never be the way they were again.

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England's other Saint George

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Bereaved of their worldly footholds — “the grand illusion had collapsed, and England was a European island once more,” he wrote — the British were all alone. Morris’s entire generation was left like Atlas, but relieved of his globe. They would have to find new burdens to carry. It was not enough for him. He wanted more.

So, approaching middle-age, Morris hurled himself into two vast concurrent projects, two escape plans from the wreckage of Britain and his own masculinity. One concerned the past, and the Empire. One concerned the future, and his identity.

Though Clements never makes the connection explicit, it’s clear that James’s decision to become Jan was a peculiarly original response to the end of the British Empire. Read the Pax Britannica trilogy (1968-1978), the first of those projects, written as she transitioned. It is thunderously problematic. Morris described her response to Empire as “sensuous”. She cherished British cruelty in a way no one would dare do today. Empire was was a “flare”, a “blaze”, and an “ambition for its own sake”. As the 19th century turned, the British “yearned to break out of their sad and prosaic realities, and live more brilliant lives in Xanadu”. Other lands, from Ireland to India, were collateral, and Morris could live with that.

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Gender shadows these books. Clearly, it made Morris’s hairs stand on end to think about the sheer effrontery of men like Robert Clive, or Admiral “Jackie” Fisher or Winston Churchill. She remembered the gentlemen of the East India Company as “showy, amoral… Plundering, fighting and trading in a spirit of uncensorious give and take”. She loved the men of peak Empire even more. They had everything the men in her generation lacked: constancy, surety, a granite bedrock of Christian faith. Here she is on John Nicholson, an Anglo-Irish Army officer who flew through British India like a tempest. He was “a fable in his own lifetime… He was a fighter… He was a big man… He looked utterly sure.”

By the third volume of the trilogy, Farewell The Trumpets (1978), composed after Morris had her gender reassignment surgery in Casablanca, it was not merely the British Empire that was coming apart. It was British masculinity itself. Suez was the empire’s tomb, and a finale for the British male. Looking back at the troops sent to occupy Port Said in 1955, she saw them as “self-conscious”, their half-hearted war-making “somehow fraudulent”, suffused with a “sham virility”. Around them the Egyptian city stood “shattered and appalled… a bitter memorial to the last display of imperial machismo.” All the certainty had vanished. The sad-sack farrago at Suez raised more than geopolitical questions for Morris. If, after centuries of vigorous domination, British masculinity was impotent and no longer plausible, then why be a British man at all?

Well, how about a woman? This was the second project. In Conundrum, Morris elaborated on her notion of womanhood. It was not designed to please feminists. It was designed to be the opposite of the Victorian imperialists Morris so admired. “My own notion of the female principle was one of gentleness as against force, forgiveness rather than punishment, give more than take, helping more than leading.” In post-Imperial Britain, if Morris could not be a wolf, she would be a lamb. She would escape into her own romantic idea of femininity. To be a woman rather than a man, she argued, was simply a matter of “good taste”.

Published in 1974, Conundrum became, in Clements’ imaginative phrase, a “media circus”. Morris, the handsome writer, was the highest-profile person to change gender in British history. Her persona was savaged in print and on television. “She sounds not like a woman, but like a man’s idea of a woman,” wrote Rebecca West, “and curiously enough, the idea of a woman not nearly so intelligent as James Morris used to be.” Germaine Greer accused a “self-indulgent” Morris of lacking frankness about what her “new body looks like and how it works”. Nora Ephron laughed at her: Morris was “perfectly awful at being a woman; what she has become instead is… A girl”. A particularly brutal drubbing in the Times Literary Supplement left Morris writing to the editor. “Your cruel review of Conundrum has reduced me to tears.”

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Every line of today’s battles over gender identity was scripted in the furore around Conundrum and Morris in the early Seventies. She appeared on a BBC talkshow and faced a 45-minute barrage of questions from an MP, a psychiatrist and a feminist. Morris was told that her book was “proselytising and immoral”. Her notion of womanhood was “ridiculous” and “limited”. Morris responded that it was “arrogant” to assume anyone could know what anyone else might feel like. The transexual experience was an “inner-music” and a quest towards a new reality. Gender, Morris told millions of TV viewers, “is the way people feel and the way they want other people to think about them — it is the spirit, the soul, and the innermost essence of what people feel they are.” Morris was saying that trans women are women. She may have been the first to do so in Britain. “I’m afraid you must take it or leave it”, she told the bewildered panel.

Overnight, Morris’s life was truly allegorical. Her life was a bridge between two worlds. The first was the old reality, where identity was confirmed in collective endeavours like the British Empire, inherited beliefs like Christianity and powerful institutions like the Armed Forces or Fleet Street. When she became a woman, Morris was clearing a path towards the second world we live in now. Identity is confirmed by the individual, through a series of deliberate choices rather than an inherited set of traditions, and based entirely on feelings. All she wanted, “was the liberty of us all to live as we wished to live, to love however we wanted to love”.

Morris suspected that she was a prophet. “Is mine only a transient phenomenon” she wondered, “between the dogmatism of the last century, when men were men and women were ladies, and the eclecticism of the next, when citizens will be free to live in the gender roles they prefer?” Asked about the pushback against the trans movement in 2017, an increasingly ancient Morris said our “moment is messy, but I think more and more people will move to my condition”. She believed it was possible that “everyone has the potential to have both genders in them”.

Jan Morris was an early adopter of an ideology that has swept across the Western world in the past 30 years. Conundrum has never been out of print. Morris’s belief — born from the collapse of empire, engineered to replace her imperial faith — that gender is ineffable and innate, are becoming commonplace in institutional settings. When Morris died, one of the leading tributes came from the chief executive of the Tavistock Clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service.

Is this simply fashion? Is this ideology “cronyistic” as Helen Joyce, and other gender-critical writers have suggested? Some feminists argue that gender-identity ideology will be abandoned “when it is no longer in the ascendent”, the politicians and tech billionaires will junk the pronouns in their emails, biology will reassert itself, and women will no longer have penises.

Morris prefigured our present, but perhaps she represented the future too. Our great-grandparents believed that masturbation caused insanity. Our great-grandchildren may come to view the idea that only natal women can bear children with a mixture of condescension, alarm, and laughter. A quaint and horrible belief, like phrenology.

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A very British Hajj

By Will Lloyd

“The sexual attitudes of any given society”, Gore Vidal said, “are the result of political decisions.” He was right. Biological facts exist only up to a point. Power is more important. If power decides that fantasy and feeling take precedence over evolution and biology, then fantasy and feeling become fact. The distinction between the sexes can be socially engineered. The technology to make it so exists.

Whether such a shift will make people happier — which is surely the point of it — is difficult to answer. In her life as a woman, we can detect something quietly unwell about Morris. Nothing was as it seemed. She told interviewers how much she loved floral dresses and embraced a rather desperate frivolity. The hard-edges of James Morris were publicly sanded away. She would no longer take things that seriously — “far better in my opinion to regard the great world as a kind of show, a tragicomedy put on for my fascination”. Such an attitude of high unseriousness can only come from believing that there are no great causes left, that nothing really matters, so you may as well laugh. She  praised callowness. “Give me fizz, give me irresponsibility, and if I ever feel maturity creeping in, crack a bottle, put out more flags, and ring bells!”

It was a masquerade. “Many wondered,” writes Clements, “if there was an underlying melancholy behind this facade”. Seen as a whole, Morris’s entire life appears as a trick question, like the one she asked the Queen that day in Buckingham Palace. Could Britain get over the loss of Empire? And could a man be a woman? Morris was not the first, nor will she be the last, to discover that there are no simple answers to either question.

Two new books aim to give a flavour of what it’s like to be non-binary. None of the Above, by performer Travis Alabanza, offers “Reflections from Life Beyond the Binary”. And Voice of the Fish is a “lyrical essay” that combines scrapbook-like quotes with autobiographical fragments and free-associative prose, to convey something of author Lars Horn’s self-experience.

In one sense, the books are starkly different: Horn is a skilled writer, while Alabanza is mediocre at best. But they share a number of common features — most strikingly, a distinctive blurriness. It’s an intentional feature of Horn’s writing, and in Alabanza’s case probably more a function of bad style. But these differing types of incoherence — intentional and unintentional — reflect the wider political implications of “non-binary”, inviting questions about just how far this idea can really be carried.

Both are, crucially, books about being misfits. Alabanza describes (with characteristic clunkiness) a “lack of ability to fit into the boxes they are trying to place you in”. Mercifully more succinct, Horn echoes this: “I did not fit.” For the latter, who self-describes as “Nonbinary, transmasculine”, gender isn’t easily categorised but “unseen, unintelligible”: “I sense myself as movement. As lake or late-night radio. As a thing that feels weighted, finds it hard to rise, break surface.”

Both writers express the same longing to inhabit the world in a more fluid, protean and self-created way. Water, swimming, tides, sea-life and blurring physically at the edges are recurring themes in Voice of the Fish, and Alabanza employs a similar aquatic metaphor: “A body of water, potential to do so much, yet eventually bottled.”

Unsurprisingly, then, both authors are ambivalent about boundaries and solidity: in other words, about their physical selves. Alabanza self-describes as feeling “like an imposter [sic] in my body”, elsewhere referring to “my body and its desires” as though these are wholly independent entities. And Voice of the Fish thrums with the tension between Horn’s sensual descriptions of the world, and dissociated, disembodied account of selfhood.

Accounts of swimming in a too-small wetsuit and nearly drowning, of an eerie encounter with a folk-healer, of walking across sharp barnacles after a freezing sea-swim, all have a bright, tactile immediacy. And yet Voice of the Fish is also littered with self-objectification, and a sense of bodies as things: references to “this body”, “one’s body”, “the body”, “bodies so often marginalised or written over”. For Horn, embodiment appears to be something abstract, experienced at a distance:

“I am grateful for my body, for how it moves me through the world, but I do experience it as distance, as transient shell that I will walk out of in the same way I walked in. I identify with the gazes put upon it. Their exteriority. To look at myself more than as myself. To experience oneself from within, but, also, crucially, from without.”

For Alabanza, this sense of disembodiment is everyone else’s fault, for inflicting the arbitrary “gender binary” upon the world. Horn’s account of growing up offers richer and stranger possibilities, recounting childhood with a heavy-drinking, indebted mother, a fine artist who called Horn’s school projects ‘bits of twonky shite’ and used her child, from an early age, as the model for her work:

“I have modelled in baths, glass cases, on beds, beaches, in forests. My body covered in dead fish, offal, dried flowers, ashes. My body cast, photographed, filmed, watched by gallery audience. My mother’s instructions always: Look dead, Lars, look more dead.”

Never mind the stereotypical “always played with opposite-sex toys” narrative (though this is also, briefly, present in both). After such a childhood, it would be strange for Horn to have reached adulthood with anything other than a sense of being an object.

Both accounts also betray, albeit perhaps less intentionally, a father-shaped hole. Alabanza fondly recalls “Hangwolf”, a childhood-era German lodger who served as temporary father-figure, then later reflects on “the man who drove me to football because my own was too busy somewhere else”, and “how so many of us grow up with fathers playing hide and seek, so the wider community becomes our dads”. Being called “son”, for Alabanza, could thus feel “like both a punch and a hug”.

Similarly, in Horn’s accounts of international travel, older men frequently appear as friends and protectors. Jean-Marie, a retired French railway worker, takes Horn to visit a healer who uses what appears to be folk magic to cure a chronic skin ailment. Ivano, a Georgian mechanic and driver, offers a son in marriage. Feodor, Horn’s host in Tbilisi, makes tea and shows photographs and quiet kindness. The sense the author describes, of tacit recognition and acceptance, evokes fatherliness in its warmest and least authoritarian form:

“Somehow, like Feodor, Ivano saw me, the pace and gesture of me. Even when what he was understanding came without cultural framework, he grasped it—understanding as physicality, as a texture between bodies, unspoken yet sensed.”

But the most striking commonality between the books is arguably a function of their central theme: “non-binary” identity. For inasmuch as “gender” serves as part of a broad pre-existing matrix of social meanings that shape our public selves, both authors seem to experience this shaping as a kind of violence.

Alabanza declares that “the initial act of deciding I am not man or woman was to gain autonomy for myself”. But the desire for total control over one’s own self-definition raises the question of  whether it’s even possible to have social meaning – after all, if no one else contributes, such meanings are no longer “social” as such. More troubling still, if definition is felt as violence in the context of gender, does the idea of definition-as-violence apply to language too? And what does this mean for our ability to communicate?

If these two books are anything to go by, the answer is: it becomes extremely difficult to say anything clearly. This works well enough in Voice of the Fish, provided you don’t mind a bit of arty meandering. Horn is a compelling writer, and the choice of arty meandering as a literary form is in any case appropriate for the material. Voice of the Fish drifts back and forth between the author’s childhood, youthful travels and present moment, interspersed with excerpts from a range of literary sources. The effect is of a mosaic, deliberately loose, where associations and impressions accumulate in drifts while avoiding precisely those hard-edged ‘this’ or ‘that’ definitions that both Horn and Alabanza seem to experience as painful in the context of ‘gender’.

“I have never enjoyed clean history, neat lines and traceable cause and effect,” declares Horn. “I’ve always enjoyed a more haphazard, more crustacean zigzag through the past.” The book’s meandering form encapsulates this approach, sidling crabwise at the strangeness of Horn’s worldview. The final passages describe flooded Florida streets: a blurring of marine and human terrains, the dissolution of hard edges. And perhaps such blurriness is the only way such strangeness could be depicted with any authenticity.

By contrast, I doubt the incoherence in None of the Above is deliberate: it’s more that in attempting to make a rigorous argument against clear-cut identities, Alabanza succeeds mainly in going round in circles on the topic of Alabanza. In fairness, where this is all that’s attempted – that is, where the book sticks to personal anecdote — the prose is relatively clear. Anecdotes about street harassment, or being rebuked by the local cornershop-owner for wearing lipstick, have an immediacy that draws the reader on.

Unfortunately, though, None of the Above doesn’t stop there, but attempts to theorise each personal anecdote to make wider points about “life beyond the binary”: for example, whether or not there’s such a thing as “proper” trans, or how such identities interact with race and class. And once away from personal stories, the prose is relentlessly awkward.

Examples are legion, but this serves to illustrate: “My existence supersedes any agreed social contract of how people are supposed to act.” It’s some distance from the “incisive” and “extraordinary” prose promised by Canongate’s editorial director when she acquired None of the Above. Nor can this be excused by Alabanza’s own (frequently referenced) position in the intersectional victimhood stack. There are plenty of excellent prose stylists out there who are queer, trans, black, all of the above, or otherwise not white or cisheteropatriarchal. It’s simply that Alabanza isn’t a very good writer.

Perhaps the kindest thing that can be said about None of the Above is that, despite attaining neither argumentative rigour nor enjoyably arty meandering, it occasionally hits on something that rings true. “I am trans because of you,” Alabanza declares, “not because of me.” That is, outliers such as Alabanza and Horn have been shoved to the margins by social categories that refuse to make room for them.

And both clearly experience this as an unhappy, tiring state of affairs. Indeed, the one theme in None of the Above that feels sincere, rather than lifted from third-hand theory, is how much longer Alabanza can bear to keep resisting these uncomfortable categories. Having attained fame and attention via a jarringly ambiguous “non-binary” presentation, Alabanza spends the book going back and forth over whether to ditch this in favour of passing more straightforwardly as a “she”. It is, after all, “exhausting to sit outside of any box”.

One may sympathise with this dilemma while wondering whether a measure of pragmatism might not be in everyone’s interests. After all, it’s hard to see how we can accommodate those who experience every form of social meaning as violent impingement, short of abolishing all social meaning. And a culture stripped of both social meanings and the ability to think is no culture at all. Voice of the Fish enacts the least worst version of this perspective: radical subjectivism as an art form. By contrast, None of the Above is probably a more accurate reflection of what a politics of radical ambiguity means in practice, among those less literate than Horn: woolly thinking and self-absorption.

In terms of quality, then, this duo of non-binary books is as binary as it gets. If a highly unusual personal account of sexuality, illness, body-dissociation, marine life and the weird byways of classical literature sounds like your thing, even the most gender-critical reader may enjoy Voice of the Fish. But None of the Above deserves neither your time nor money.

This month, media organisations and mega corporations will bend over backwards to find an LGBTQ angle to cover. But what you won’t see or hear is the underside of Pride: a culture of intense social and sexual pressure that’s pushing some lesbians back into the closet and encouraging others to identify out of womanhood altogether. 

It started with the push to redefine “lesbian” to be inclusive of heterosexual males who identify as women. But it didn’t stop there. Now same-sex attraction is out, redefined as a problematic “genital preference”. A surprising number of hardline activists vilify lesbians as “genital fetishists” and accuse them of practising “sexual apartheid”.

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Meanwhile, lesbians are bombarded with suggestions on “how to have lesbian sex with a trans woman”. Safe-sex guides for lesbians provide information on avoiding pregnancy and performing blowjobs. Healthline’s “How Do Lesbians Have Sex?” guide, which targets sexually inexperienced women and girls, reminds readers that “any person can have any type of sex”. “[D]on’t apply assumptions you apply to cis men to us, our body works in different ways,” a columnist for Allure scolded readers: “Keep an open mind, and remember you’re having sex with a woman who knows more about her body than you do about hers.”

Not convinced yet? “Estrogenized dicks are… a lot like if a vagina was shaped like a dick and testes… Sex with an estrogenized dick is its own experience, but it’s MUCH MORE like sex with a vagina than sex with a man’s dick!” This remarkable advertisement concludes with a denial of what’s being pushed and why: 

“Don’t have sex with anyone you don’t want to! You don’t ever have to give a reason why you don’t want to have sex with someone… But if you go out of your way to tell everyone that you won’t have sex with trans women, and your reasoning is that you think trans women are men, and that sex with us is like sex with men, don’t be surprised when people call you out as an uninformed bigot!” 

Or, as one “trans lesbian” put it: “Being shut off from the very idea of it, not even considering that having my penis inside you is different from having a man’s penis inside you? That hurts.”

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Somehow, telling lesbians that they “just haven’t tried the right dick yet” went woke.

Young lesbians get the message — from their peers in the “queer” community, their role models in arts and culture, the media, and medical providers — that their discomfort with any of this means that they may really be straight men trapped in gay women’s bodies. Sometimes, adopting an idiosyncratic gender identity — like “transmasc non-binary who’s attracted to women” or “feminamoric” — may be the only way a young woman can set boundaries around her sex life.

Last year, two friends and I launched Unspeakable LGBTQ. We asked: What do you wish you could say about your experiences as a woman in the LGBTQ community? 

Some women talked about intense pressure to identify out of womanhood. When femininity — not sex — makes someone a “woman”, women who don’t conform to stereotypes come under scrutiny: “I wish I could talk about how non-conforming women are being pressured to identify as a different gender to validate transwomen’s ‘femininity,’” wrote one respondent. “Feeling alienated by femininity is a near-universal female experience, especially for gay and bisexual women — not something that means you’re not a woman at all,” wrote another. Another respondent confessed that she now feels “​more comfortable around my conservative neighbors than I do in ‘queer’ liberal circles because my neighbors call me a lesbian and a woman… [in the LGBTQ community] I’ve had people ask me if I am truly non-binary or a trans man because I have short hair and don’t wear makeup or dresses.” 

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Relentless policing of lesbians’ sexual orientation and self-expression run through these stories. One woman compared the LGBTQ community today to her experience growing up in the Mormon religion, “where women are subservient in every way that matters”:

“We are allowed to have no leadership positions without the permission or surveillance of men, even in our own organizations… I was excited to join LGBT spaces and meet people like me. But it wasn’t like that. I left one cult and found out that what awaited me was another. In LGBT and other “progressive” circles, women don’t have the right to assemble without the presence of males who, by nature of being male, have no ability to relate to the experiences of female people. Just like my old religion, you aren’t allowed to question the ideology (in this case transgenderism) without being ostracized… Just like my old religion, men’s feelings and sensibilities must be taken into account in everything that women do.”

Another recalled her evangelical upbringing, writing: “I’d really really like, as a lesbian woman, to no longer be surrounded by transwomen who parrot the same talking points and shame tactics used, nearly word for word, by the youth pastor that tried to help me ‘pull away from sin’,” one woman wrote. “I never thought I would have to defend my sexuality against people in the community”, said another. “I get to feel wrong for how I am and how I love all over again.”

One university student described her brief involvement with the LGBTQ community on campus: “I hoped to meet other same-sex attracted people in the ‘lgbtq+’ club at my new university. It was not a community. There were some gay men and some lesbians, but there were also men who told me to my face that they were lesbians. That I should ‘be open to penis’. That I was a bad person for being a lesbian. I didn’t stay.” Another respondent admitted, “I forced myself to date trans women because I was made to feel like I was a bigot for not being attracted to them as a lesbian. It was incredibly traumatic and I was treated like utter crap.”

Responding to a climate where women who dissent from gender identity ideology face threats of violence, one woman wrote: “I want to talk about the incredible setbacks we’ve made in both women’s rights and same-sex rights without people threatening to beat, rape, or kill me.” 

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For women who have firsthand experience identifying as transgender or transitioning — before deciding to desist or detransition — the LGBTQ community reinforces patterns of thinking that caused distress and harm. One detransitioned woman reflected: 

“I spent years running from being a butch lesbian. I transitioned in order to escape the shame & fear I had. When I finally came to terms with the fact that transition had not really helped & I was still the same me I detransitioned… I wanted community more then anything. But there isn’t a place for me anymore. Before I transitioned there were several lesbian groups in my area. They aren’t here anymore. As far as I can tell there is no lesbian space or group anywhere in my area… I can not express how painful it is to not have a place to belong.”

One of the most wrenching submissions was also the simplest and shortest — speaking to something the community at large seems to have forgotten: “there is nothing wrong with women who are only attracted to the female body.” An LGBTQ community in thrall to gender identity and “trans inclusivity” necessarily sacrifices belonging and acceptance for same-sex attracted women.  

For women who want to be part of the LGBTQ community, there’s no escaping gender identity ideology. “The problem with leaving the ‘trans cult’ as a lesbian is that you can never really leave,” one young desisted woman wrote. “The ideology is in every LGBT space, every LGBT charity, every dating site, on the front page of our news sites every single day.” 

In other words, you can accept yourself as a lesbian. You can desist or detransition from a trans identity. You can accept your sex and your sexual orientation. But if you want to stand under that rainbow flag, you’re not allowed to say so.

That all changed last month, when a series of high-profile stories swept trans issues into the national spotlight, starting with the victory of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas at the NCAA women’s swimming championship. Although Thomas was, for the most part, lauded by the press, the victory was accompanied by protests, complaints from the parents of other competitors, and a string of anonymous tabloid leaks from Thomas’s teammates — at least some of whom seemed opposed to her presence on the team.

The pictures of the broad-shouldered, 6’1” Thomas towering over her competitors, were striking. Long-winded explanations about the role of testosterone in athletic performance aside, it was hard for the average person to conclude she hadn’t had a competitive advantage.

Then, later the same month, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education Act into law. The “Don’t Say Gay” bill was vociferously opposed by the White House, much of the media, and major corporations such as Disney and Apple; it prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from preschool to third grade — roughly ages four to nine — and requires that parents be notified about any medical or mental-health issues with their children. Prominent liberals were scathing, with Biden denouncing the law as “hateful”, Pete Buttigieg’s husband warning that it will “kill kids”, and the hosts of the Oscars chanting the word “gay” in protest. The Right, meanwhile, has launched itself into a frenzy, accusing Democrats of wanting to “groom” children and insinuating that opponents of the law are pedophiles.

It is no coincidence that both pillars of the current trans controversies relate to education. A leitmotif of the post-pandemic world has been parental rebellion against progressive excesses in schools and instruction on issues such as race and gender. Remote schooling allowed parents to peek into their children’s classrooms, where they saw elementary schoolers being instructed to rank themselves on an intersectional privilege hierarchy and to celebrate the “black communism” of Angela Davis.

Republicans, sensing opportunity, have embraced the parental crusade with anti-CRT bills, curriculum transparency bills, and, in some states, new restrictions on trans athletes and “gender-affirming” medical procedures. They are responding to the fact that the woke extremism popular with professional educators is deeply unpopular with voters. Indeed, wokeness in general is unpopular, and “educators”, as a class, are something like the Salafists of social justice. This is a specific instance of a general problem for the Democrats: its professional and leadership class is fond of social positions that strike a lot of ordinary people as wacky or perverse.

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Democrats, however, have fallen into what Ruy Teixeira calls the “Fox News fallacy” — the idea that if Republicans are complaining about something, it must be made up. On CRT, for instance, they have used the unconvincing defence that CRT is only taught in law schools and dismissed parental concerns as a product of “disinformation.”

Similarly, they have cast the Parental Rights in Education Act as a homophobic attempt to “force kids back into the closet” and prevent gay teachers from discussing their home life in the classroom — when, in fact the main concern of the bill is gender identity. The strategy, as Leor Sapir has argued, has been to make the debate over the law a debate over gay rights — which are supported by the vast majority of Americans — while dodging the much more contentious issue of whether, and how, schools should be teaching about gender.

This is no idle concern. What evidence we do have suggests that paediatric gender dysphoria is rising at a rate that would be almost impossible to explain purely as a result of greater acceptance or diagnostic sophistication. One clinic in Northern California reported an 500% increase in paediatric referrals for gender dysphoria between 2015 and 2018, while in Sweden, gender dysphoria diagnoses among teenage girls rose by over 1,500% between 2008 and 2018.

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By Park MacDougald

Some researchers, such as Brown University’s Lisa Littman, have argued that this rapid increase is consistent with other social contagions such as anorexia or cutting. This suggests that many children are adopting these identities due to peer influences and social media consumption rather than a stable and deeply felt sense of dysphoria. But if these messages are reinforced at school, they may be more likely to stick.  This is a particularly explosive issue given that schools have encouraged children to socially transition without notifying their parents, and some states, such as California, consider failure to affirm a child’s gender identity as grounds for stripping a parent of custody rights.

Although Littman’s work has been denounced as “misinformation”, it has received support from a number of “detransitioners” who have gone public with their stories. Their stories, on the whole, follow a pattern: a girl who is struggling with an unrelated mental health issue such as anxiety or depression falls down an Internet rabbit-hole, where she learns she is unhappy because she was born in the “wrong body”. She visits a psychiatrist who, instead of interrogating her feelings, “affirms” that she is actually a boy and sets them on the road to medical transition.

Only later, sometimes after painful surgeries, do the girls realise that whatever was bothering them was not gender dysphoria but another unresolved psychological issue. They are left wondering why the adults in their lives allowed them to damage their bodies in the name of what they later come to believe was a delusion. Due in part to stories like these — and to the lack of solid evidence in favour of “gender-affirming” care — a number of European countries have begun to discourage medical interventions for youth gender dysphoria in favour of psychotherapy.

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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The Biden administration’s great strength so far has been its ability to recognise when the preferences of the Twitter class are deeply out of step with those of the public and then side with the public. Here, it has done the opposite. Last week, in response to the Florida and two recent Arizona laws (one banning biological males from girls’ sports, the other banning medical transitions for minors), the administration announced that it would be expanding its interpretation of Title IX — a federal law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in education — to include protections for gender identity.

The full implications of the move are unclear, but they could include denying federal education funds to states that bar trans athletes from girls’ sports. Separately, the Justice Department warned states that any attempt to limit access to “gender-affirming” care for children could be in violation of the Constitution and federal civil rights law.

Biden may be miscalculating. Americans are by and large tolerant of differences and tend to take a laissez-faire attitude when it comes to how individuals choose to live their own lives. But they also have a basic sense of fair play and proportion. Majorities oppose laws, such as Arizona’s, prohibiting “gender-transition related medical care for minors”, presumably because they seem to legislate individual medical decisions. But a solid majority believe that trans athletes should compete on teams that match their birth sex, and polling suggests that even a majority of Florida Democrats supports the language of the Parental Rights in Education Act.

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In short, Americans tend to support trans rights when they are analogous to gay rights, meaning when they are seen as a simple matter of accepting those who are different. But they are more sceptical of the maximalist positions pushed by elite progressives — that the Lia Thomases of the world should be permitted to compete as women, or that schools should be allowed to facilitate major medical decisions for children without parental notification or consent.

By picking a national fight over these issues, the Biden administration risks stepping into a trap it has so far avoided: siding with the common sense of college-educated progressives against the common sense of the electorate as a whole. For a GOP attempting to rebrand itself as the party of ordinary people, this could be a blessing in disguise.

But Harvey is not a woman. He is a male serial killer.

The New York Times, formerly a paper of record, but more recently a censorious mouthpiece, referred to Marcelin its report as, “An 83-year-old Brooklyn woman”. In fact, almost all media reports of his latest crime – murdering and dismembering a woman he met two years ago online – refer to Marcelin as “she” and “her”.

Marcelin already has two convictions for killing women, and has served much of the past five decades in jail. He was released in 2019, but earlier this month, he was taken into custody again, after the severed remains of Susan Leydon were discovered at his home and local area. The “defrauding the government” on the charge sheet referred to his attempts to cover up his crime.

Marcelin began his long career of violence with an assault charge in 1957. In 1963, he was arrested and charged with attempted rape, but the case was dropped when the victim didn’t show up to court. As violent men do, he escalated, and murderered Jaqueline Bonds on 18 April 1963. He shot her in the head in front of witnesses in Harlem. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years to life.

While in prison, Marcelin served repeated stints in solitary confinement, about which he submitted numerous complaints that this amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment”. All were dismissed. Then, in 1984, having served only 13 years of his sentence, he was released on lifetime parole.

The following year, 1985, he fatally stabbed Anna Laura Serrera Miranda and dumped her body in a bag on a roadway near Central Park. Despite this being the second woman he had killed, he plea bargained down from murder to first degree manslaughter and was sentenced to just six to 12 years.

Every two years, Marcelin unsuccessfully applied for parole. At one hearing, he blamed his crimes on “youth and poor judgement and stupidity”, and was rebuked by a parole officer, who told him he was a “grown ass man”. Marcelin complained about this comment, but it went nowhere.

Following his 1997 parole hearing, Marcelin submitted a complaint to the court that he had been denied a fair hearing because all three members of the parole board were women. He felt that the nature of his crimes would lead women to be biased against him, telling the court, “I have problems with women.” But his complaint was rejected by a three-judge panel as speculative and baseless.

In 2001, according to the court filing, a guard “observed the prisoner [Marcelin] engaged in an act of oral intercourse with another inmate”. He had to face a hearing about it, but no penalty was applied. Eventually, in 2019, the parole board made the decision to release him.

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On 27 February this year, Susan Leyden was seen entering Marcelin’s apartment, carrying a multi coloured bag. On 3 March, a woman’s torso was discovered in a garbage bag in a shopping cart on a busy street in East New York, Brooklyn during the early morning hours. Five days later, a leg was discovered in Cypress Hill only blocks away from where the torso was discovered. The next day, detectives questioned Marcelin following reports that he had been seen leaving the apartment with the same bag. A search of Marcelin’s home turned up a human head, and electric saws he had bought from a nearby Home Depot. Then a severed leg was found, four blocks away, poking out of a tire, cut from the knee down and still wearing a sock. Astonishingly, Marcelin was caught on CCTV in a 99-cent store in Brooklyn, in his wheelchair, with Leydon’s severed leg, wrapped in a garbage bag.

Nora[1. Not her real name], an experienced lawyer and feminist campaigner based in Brooklyn, is furious.  “It outrages me that this perpetrator murdered one woman, was released on parole, then brutally murdered a second woman within months and was later paroled again. How would that be possible in a world that valued women’s lives?” She tells me that even with serial murders of women, some victims are seen as expendable.

At the time of his arrest, Marcelin was living at Stonewall House, New York City’s first LGBT-welcoming senior housing. No one seems to know when Marcelin began identifying as a woman, but there is no evidence that he had undergone treatment of any kind, and it would appear that he was presenting as male until very close to the discovery of Leydon’s remains.

“He needs to be incarcerated,” Nora says. “But at the same time, we need to protect incarcerated women. How would I feel if a woman I cared about were put in a cell with this defendant? I’m worried about women being confined with this person. We have to be able to talk about those concerns.”

I also spoke to Oren Yaniv, Director of Communication at Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office about Marcelin’s case. At first, Yaniv used male pronouns to refer to Marcelin, then within a couple of minutes he suddenly switched to “she”.

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“I don’t know what her driver’s license says,” he told me, when I asked if Marcelin had legally transitioned. “Usually in the US these days it is based on a person’s preference, so right now she identifies as a woman, and we are respecting that.” So does that mean Marcelin will be held in female correctional facilities? “To the best of my knowledge, yes,” he replied.

But what about the risk he may pose to the women incarcerated with a male serial killer? Wasn’t this of concern to the DA?“I’m sure that they are taking precautions now,” Yaniv said, “this individual has spent… years in prison already, where to my knowledge they did not kill anybody, I don’t think there are too many chainsaws in prison but… she won’t be the only accused murderer that’s being held in Riker and they have policies and precautions to, you know, minimise the violence of it.”

He also confirmed at trial, “we respect the person’s gender identity… She identifies as a woman, and we refer [to] her as a woman.” Marcelin will be referred to in court as she/her. The DA’s office and the correctional facilities will “respect” Marceline’s gender identity, make the bold assumption that his transition is genuine, call him she/her in court, and put him in prison with women.

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Susan Leyden, Marcelin’s latest victim, was a devoted single mother. At her funeral, her daughter Nicole said, “Mom had a heart of gold. She was so much fun to be around. Our relationship was more like sisters at times. Perhaps because it was just the two of us, I never wanted to leave her side.”

I feel for Leyden’s daughter, and her family, and the families of the other victims. They will have to listen to the court referring to a male serial killer as “she” and “her”. They will have to live with the fact that the second and third murders were entirely foreseeable and preventable if the authorities had only acted. And all the women who will be incarcerated with this man, and who are already vulnerable will know that they have been put seriously at risk.

Marcelin epitomises the worst example of unbridled male violence, and to pretend he is the same sex as those whose lives he destroyed is nothing short of an abomination.

It’s hard to deny that the practice of self-identification is increasingly open to abuse — in the UK, as well as in America. Only last week Baroness Nicholson broke the story of the rape of a woman in a female ward by a male-bodied transwoman, who had been allowed in the ward thanks to the acceptance by the NHS of self-identification.

Gender identity ideology often comes packaged in warm and fuzzy clichés. “Trans women are women”; “What impact does it have on your life anyway?”; “Can’t you just be kind?” But for how much longer can we ignore the grave consequences for women when predatory men take advantage of the new rules of this ideology.

As the mother of a son who identifies as part of the transgender community,[1. My son uses the pronouns associated with his sex. I have chosen to remain anonymous to protect his identity.] the prospect of there being an epidemic of trans murders holds an added weight: is my son’s life in danger? Should I be beside myself with worry when he travels to work, let alone when goes out to a gig at a weekend? Suffice it to say that this is not an issue that I can afford to take lightly.

Facts always matter — but they take on a particular importance when they’re being used to claim that your child could be murdered. So I decided to delve into the research used to inform these claims. For me, it was personal.

The Government doesn’t publish data on the number of transgender people in the UK, though in 2018 it “tentatively” estimated that the figure stood between “approximately 200,000-500,000”. What proportion of that number must have been killed to warrant today’s warnings of trans murder epidemic? 10? 100? 1,000?

To find out, I analysed data collected by the trans-led organisation Transgender Europe, which has received more than a million dollars from the Arcus Foundation, who are based in the US and take a keen interest in transgender issues. As well as donating almost $150,000 to Stonewall, in 2015 the Arcus Foundation handed $312,000 to Transgender Europe specifically to supply reliable global data on transgender murders. The website it created provides an interactive map and links to documents naming the transgender victims.

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Looking at Transgender Europe’s list of cases, it became clear — to my relief — that  the total murders reported for the United Kingdom since 2008 amounted to 11. This translates as a murder rate of around 0.165%.

Now, that is still significantly higher than the murder rate for the UK as a whole: the ONS reports that the homicide rate in the UK for the year ending March 2020 was 11.7 per million people, rising to 17 per million among men. But look a bit closer at the list of trans murder victims, and that figure of 11 becomes increasingly suspect.

For instance, two of the listed victims, Vikki Thompson and Jacqueline Cowdry, appear to have been erroneously included. Thompson died by suicide while incarcerated in HMP Leeds, while Cowdry’s death was ultimately ruled as non-suspicious. This reduces the total to nine unlawful deaths, all of whom were born male. (By contrast, the number of homicides committed by transgender people between 2008 and 2017 was 12.) For context, the number of women killed by men during the same period was 1800. So much for our alleged “cis-privilege”.

Searching for more information led me to the work of Karen Ingala-Smith, who founded the Counting Dead Women project in 2012 after she realised that there was no central record of the extent of femicide here in the UK; thanks to her, a list of murdered women is read out in the House of Commons each year to imprint the rate of femicide on the minds our political class. Ingala-Smith’s tireless work focusses on female victims of, predominantly, male violence, though she made an exception to highlight the discrepancy between the mass hysteria about transgender victims of homicide compared to the treatment of woman-killing as mere background noise. (There is still no equivalent to the Trans Day of Remembrance for the much greater number of women killed by male violence.)

Crucially, her research sheds a vital spotlight on the nine remaining victims identified by the Trans Murder Monitoring report. Reading it, two things become clear. The first is that it is not entirely certain that all the victims themselves identified with the label “transgender”. The second is that the motives behind these crimes are more complex than straightforward “transphobia”.

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Three of the nine victims were murdered by a violent punter while working as prostitutes; another was killed by their husband, who lived on her earnings from prostitution. Another of the victims died at the hands of someone who was also trans-identifying. Another was a gay man who cross-dressed occasionally, and the motive for the murder has been ascribed to both transphobia and homophobia. Two of the murders were linked to drug use.

In other words, despite the way their deaths are often framed in the media and by activists, the large majority of these trans victims were not killed simply for being trans. Almost half appear to involve prostitution — a fact that has been quietly brushed under the carpet.

Nor is this wilful misunderstanding confined to the UK: according to global statistics, 58% of transgender murder victims were born male and work in prostitution. It seems remarkable, then, that “Trans women are women” and “Sex work is work” remain two of the most heavily promoted mantras in trans-activist circles. Indeed, a number of role models in the trans community go as far to claim that it was only because of prostitution that they were able to afford their treatment and surgeries.

Take, for example, trans activist Janet Mock, who has described how the “sex trade becomes a road well-travelled, helping trans women alleviate financial woes while also making many of us feel desired as women”. To be fair to Mock, she has also spoken publicly about the dangers of engaging in prostitution, emphasising the impacts of economic coercion, sexual abuse and trafficking on the trans community. She has also highlighted how prostitution is heavily racialised, with black and Latino communities making up a disproportionate number of transgender “sex workers”.

For reasons of sexual politics, I do not use the phrase “sex work” on the basis that the inside of our bodies, be they male or female, is not a legitimate place of work. That isn’t to say that I believe we should reprimand former prostitutes, or those still engaged in prostitution, for using this phrase. I know of former prostituted women who say this description was a survival strategy and allowed them to distance themselves from their experience.

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But that doesn’t make the phrase helpful — especially when used to describe transgender people. In recent years, the fetishisation of the transgender body has come increasingly into focus: PornHub’s annual report for 2021 — yes, they do an annual report! — showed there had been a 126% increase for porn searches using “trans”. There is clearly a “market” for trans-identified sex acts; and paired with the vulnerability of trans people to violence and murder while engaged in prostitution, the association of trans activism with “sex work” becomes even more dangerous.

Presented in this light, it seems obvious to me that we need to rethink the accepted narrative around transgender murder rates, regurgitated with monotonous regularity by both politicians and the media. For example, rather than holding vigils, those concerned with the tragic deaths of transgender people would do better to watch The Sex Map of Britain, a BBC documentary that follows two young men who were both homosexual and rejected by their family. In one of the most heart-breaking scenes, Mia, now a transgender escort, is brought to tears when talking about maternal rejection for the crime of being gay. Later Mia seeks reassurance from a client that they enjoy each other’s company. The punter answers that he does not want to cause offence, but he is only there because of the sex on offer. In another scene, Mia talks about hoping to find love in sex filmed for pornography.

It pains me to say it, but I see my son in Mia, and of one thing I am certain: looking for love, validation and self-worth in porn and prostitution won’t help him. Likewise, pretending that there’s a trans murder epidemic, when incidents are isolated and largely confined to prostitution, is equally unhelpful and even dangerous — not just to people like my son, but to the women whose murders are quietly forgotten in favour of performative headlines about an ‘epidemic’ that doesn’t exist.

With nine books and several prizes to her name — her debut collection, The Language of Cat, was long-listed for the Carnegie Medal — Rooney’s career has been marked by success. But now it is over, following what she describes as “two and a half years of intensive bullying for doing nothing more than telling the truth”: namely, that there’s something deeply concerning about the prevailing orthodoxy around gender identity.

While JK Rowling might be too famous to cancel, those with heterodox views in the foothills of literary fame have two choices: keep quiet or leave. It’s a lesson not only Rooney has been forced to learn: only last year, Gillian Philip, who used to write animal fantasy novels under the name Erin Hunter, was suddenly dropped by her publishers after voicing her support for Rowling’s views on the importance of women-only spaces. She retrained as a lorry driver, noting that “the haulage industry is far more supportive and inclusive — and a lot less misogynistic — than the world of children’s writing”.

Rooney’s path to creative writing is a story in itself. Following a “toxic relationship” and nervous breakdown that led to her being hospitalised, poetry became her “main tool for recovery”. At 49, she won a CLiPPA (a national award for children’s poetry) for her first collection. After years of working as a teacher, she describes being “catapulted into a second career as a children’s writer”; her books were endorsed by everyone from Carol Ann Duffy to David Walliams.

But things began to change when Rooney felt compelled to investigate why so many autistic teenagers were identifying as the opposite sex. “I was once a gender non-conforming autistic child,” she tells me. “I know how it is to be uncomfortable in your own skin, to hate what society tells you it is to be female. It felt strange to realise that my growing reservations around the simplistic idea that children can be ‘born in the wrong body’ would be seen as being bigoted and hateful. I had always been progressive, even ‘woke’.”

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Rooney, undeterred by the hostility she knew might follow, started to gently question whether our understanding of gender identity has become warped — only to find herself unfriended and blocked by a number of children’s authors. Many, she explains, did “get in touch privately and admitted to being too scared to speak out — others said they had been warned off from engaging with the topic”.

But Rooney was determined not to be intimidated. So rather than back down, she decided to write a book to “counter the explosion in titles which told children they might be trapped in the wrong body if they don’t conform to stereotypes”. Through 2018 she worked on what was to become My Body is Me! with the illustrator Jessica Ahlberg. Published a year later by Transgender Trend, a well-established group of parents and professionals “who are concerned about the current trend to diagnose children as transgender”, it challenges sexist stereotypes and promotes a positive self-image.

“It’s a proudly inclusive book,” she says. “We talked in depth about the celebratory message we wanted to get across: we aimed to show a diverse range of personalities, body types and family set-ups.”

Of course, Rooney suspected she would face a backlash — but nothing could prepare her for what happened next. Ahlberg, whose parents Janet and Allan Ahlberg wrote and illustrated a number of best-selling children’s books including The Jolly Postman and Peepo, was for the most part ignored. Rooney, however, continues to be monstered and hounded more than two years later.

She explains that “a core of around a dozen authors, librarians, book bloggers and illustrators” — some of whom have allegedly been encouraged by “committee members in the Society of Authors (SoA)” — have repeatedly “smeared” her online in “an attempt to drum her out of publishing”. She recalls: “Fellow authors discussed my ‘hateful world view’, my ‘transphobia’, my bigoted, exclusionary nature and even my autism.”

Take Clara Vulliamy, creator of the Dotty Detective series and daughter of the acclaimed children’s author Shirley Hughes, described Rooney as representing “an extreme ideology that explicitly targets children”. Vulliamy even went so far as to compare Rooney to Tommy Robinson.

“In her post,” Rooney explains, “Vulliamy tagged an agency that employed me to do school visits, warning them about my views and saying ‘ideologically driven school visits could see us all in deep water’. I don’t think she’d even read My Body is Me and thankfully I had a good reputation at the schools I worked in, so kept that work. Ultimately, all I did was speak out on issues around education, literature, child development, safeguarding and more specifically, the female, autistic perspective. I did so because I care.”

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There is, however, only so much vitriol a person can endure. And soon Rooney started to struggle with bouts of debilitating anxiety. “It was exhausting. The thought of socialising with people in publishing made me feel physically sick. Poetry was not only my livelihood; it was how I stayed sane. But after the abuse from others in my profession I began to associate it with trauma.”

Then, towards the end of last year, Rooney received an urgent call from her agent to inform her that the publisher of her children’s books was unhappy with her outspoken questioning of gender identity. “I was told that my stance could be considered offensive and that people had been complaining. Two independent bookshops had refused to stock my latest picture book, The Problem with Problems, even though it was entirely unrelated to gender ideology.

“I was told I needed to stop tweeting about the risks to children from gender identity ideology and to remove posts on social media. But I was never offensive, I just told the truth as I see it.” When she refused to be silenced, Rooney was told that her Twitter account would not be copied into any online publicity “in case it sent traffic my way where people might learn of my ‘offensive’ views.”

Soon the campaign to vilify Rooney ratcheted up. Save the Children were bullied by activists into taking down from social media a charity video of Gillian Anderson reading The Problem with Problems. Waterstones was targeted after it posted a video of Tom Hardy reading the same book, though didn’t back down.

But the harassment against gender-critical authors hasn’t stopped. Last week, author Jay Hulme, who identifies as transgender, posted a tweet accusing an unnamed author who “hates that I’m trans and write for kids” of preventing the publication of one of his books. Hulme was supported by Vulliamy, who added: “People within children’s publishing, you KNOW who Jay is talking about.” Rooney wasn’t named, but is confident she was the subject of these posts.

I contacted several of those making accusations against the “unnamed author”. The only person who responded was Hulme, who told me: “I didn’t name the author for a reason — because I don’t believe in pile ons or digital attacks, and so I cannot and will not confirm any names or comment further. Had I wished to expand, I would have done already.”

The SoA also appeared to close ranks. Rather than responding to my enquiry, a press officer directed me to a link to a statement from August which outlined the SoA’s stance on inclusivity. Remarkably, their policy states that SoA will ensure “individuals are supported and able to speak out”.

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No doubt Rooney would beg to differ. The repeated smears, sly insinuations and cowardice of the professional bodies have all taken their toll, not least on how her work is received. “People often talk of cancel culture. But there is a more insidious technique at play — one that’s harder to prove but palpable to the receiver; that of ‘Ghosting Culture’. It’s when your book is left off reading lists; when it doesn’t get reviewed; when you are not invited on a panel to discuss it. It’s where organisations you’ve worked with and even long-time friends suddenly avoid sharing publicity about it.”

And yet despite everything — the abuse, the betrayal, the attempts to silence her — Rooney says she has no regrets. She has one more book due in 2022, The Fears you Fear, but it will be her last.

“I can’t work in an industry that purports to care for children yet polices and punishes those who raise safeguarding concerns,” she says. “Regardless of what anyone believes, we should always be free to talk about what’s in the best interests of children.”

However, given her venomous treatment, and that of her fellow authors, it seems unlikely she will be the last victim of the publishing purges. Her story, of overcoming barriers and reaching success in middle-age, is surely impressive; it ought to serve as an inspiration to aspiring writers. But thanks to the stunted vision of those who hold sway in children’s writing, the moral of Rooney’s tale is entirely different: “publish and be damned”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I wanted to highlight the fact that transsexualism was not a feminist-friendly issue but rather reinforces sex role stereotypes even as it claims to be progressive,” she says. “I wanted to insert a critical voice into the discussion.” She certainly achieved that — and more. In the four decades since its publication, many modern activists, albeit grossly unjustly, still view her as a bigoted monster.

Raymond was studying medical ethics when she wrote Empire, and much of her research focused on the use of technologies that were destructive to women’s bodies and minds, in particular modification technologies such as psychosurgery (formerly called lobotomy) and electroshock therapy. “My early research and activism led me to question the medical consequences of the bodily mutilations inherent in transsexual surgery and the detrimental effects of taking life-long hormones. I was a radical feminist, but feminists were not paying much attention to the emergence of transsexualism as an issue that presented a regressive challenge to women and to feminism.”

More than four decades later, Raymond’s life continues to be dogged by allegations that she is motivated by a desire to harm trans people — and her latest book will add only fuel to an already raging inferno. In Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism, Raymond forensically explores how the ideology has captured much of society.

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What motivated her to return to the gender swamp?

“Before I began writing Doublethink, I thought long and hard, knowing that the swarm of trans detractors would gleefully sting me again, only this time it would be more venomous. But I felt that since 1994, when The Transsexual Empire was reprinted and I wrote a new preface for it, I hadn’t really written anything that addressed the takeover of transgenderism and especially the rise in young women who were declaring themselves male. I wrote this book to dispel the myths of transgenderism and to take on the consequences of a runaway ideology whose reach is influencing medical care, legislation, government policies, women’s sports, childhood and university education.”

Raymond traces the progress of trans ideology over the past five decades. She looks at the shift from transsexualism to transgenderism, with a particular focus on the increasing numbers of young women who transition but later desist.

The huge rise in girls and young women who declare themselves male contrasts sharply with the picture in the Seventies, when the vast majority of those seeking sex change treatment were adult men. “Reasons why women transition are radically different from those of the men,” Raymond tells me. “A substantial number of female survivors of transgenderism report that they shifted identities from female to male because of the misogyny they had experienced.”

But, she explains, a significant portion of women who have transitioned were reluctant, because of external negativity, to admit they are actually lesbians, or did but were uncomfortable with their identity: “A number of the women also cited the social pressure to transition in a society where becoming a self-declared man is often more accepted than being a natal woman, especially a lesbian.”

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Nowhere in Doublethink does Raymond claim that trans misogynists represent the views of all trans people. As she is at pains to point out, a number of trans-identified persons and their allies have criticised the misogyny in their own communities. However, the increasing number of cyber and physical attacks by trans activists on women and lesbians, and the evolving trans ideology that supports these attacks, has come to define the movement’s political goals.

“In an age when falsehoods are commonly taken as truth, the ‘doublethink’ of a transgender movement that is able to define men as women, women as men, dissent as heresy, science as sham, and critics as fascists has become widely accepted,” she tells me. “The current rise of treating young children with puberty blockers and hormones is a widespread scandal that has been named a medical experiment on children.”

In an effort to cover this up, Raymond explains, activists have framed rapid transgender treatment for children as emergency health care. “Labelling the campaign as a health issue and an emergency was a clever strategy that promoted peoples’ sympathy and support and generated the increased establishment of gender identity clinics also called gender health centres.

“The suicide threat has also been influential in compelling parents to accept rapid gender affirmation for their children. Parents who question these treatments are often subjected to emotional blackmail when cruelly asked, ‘Do you want a live son or a dead daughter?’”

Raymond has long been accused of trying to shut down “medically necessary healthcare” for trans people, which is a very clever ruse by trans activists to frame surgery and hormones as medical as opposed to cosmetic treatment. Her book recounts harrowing stories from young women who were groomed into transitioning, partly by being told that if they didn’t, they would kill themselves.

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The use of disingenuous tactics is, of course, nothing new. “In the US, most influential were the strategic early alliances trans activists made with the mainstream corporate LGB organisations such as the Human Rights Campaign,” Raymond says. “When the T was forcibly married to these organisations without any discussion involving many lesbians and gays, it helped to push the legal envelope in various countries to achieve legal changes benefiting trans priorities, such allowing young children to change their ‘gender’ without parental approval.”

Doublethink aims to cover the full force of the transgender juggernaut. But Raymond is at pains to emphasise that her new book also “exposes the violence against women in LGBT affinity groups where young women have been subjected to rape and other forms of sexual abuse and silenced for speaking out about it”. This violence is also being ignored and silenced by mainstream LGBT organisations that “keep track of only the violence experienced by men who identify as women”.

To illustrate this, she points to the growing number of trans activists who also campaign for the decriminalisation of prostitution and the sex industry. “There are many alliances between activists who are pro-prostitution and those who are pro-transgender. By demeaning feminists who oppose the sex trade as ‘Swerfs’ [sex worker exclusionary radical feminists], a term that derives from the branding of gender critical women as Terfs, trans activists and pro-sex work advocates have joined at the hip.”

Yet in the face of such hate-filled opposition, Raymond remains hopeful. Her book largely focuses on the ‘survivor movement’. The detransitioners, the young lesbians who have been there, done that and had the double mastectomies, are the truth tellers. They are given a voice, and what important voices they are.

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I first met Raymond in the Nineties when our work to combat the global sex trade and other forms of violence against women and girls collided. In the decades since, I have seen her enter the lion’s den countless times, refusing to back down amid hostility from men’s rights activists.

But this is a battle, as many of us have come to learn, that takes its toll; for the simple reason that transgenderism has persuaded vast swathes of well-meaning liberals into thinking that trans activists are following in the footsteps of the lesbians and gay men who fought for liberation in Seventies and Eighties. Doublethink, perhaps even more than its predecessor The Transsexual Empire, could well be the perfect tool to help those deluded individuals finally see the light.

Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism is published by Spinifex Press.

Appealing to what James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign manager, has dubbed “faculty lounge politics” — with its emphasis on Critical Race Theory, racial quotas, transgenderism and defunding the police — has become an obvious flaw in their political strategy. These positions might prove popular in certain sections of the media, but not so much among the public.

The Virginia results made evident these failures, particularly on radical education and transgender policies. A state that was on the verge of becoming a deep blue bastion, largely based on the affluent Washington suburbs, moved to the Right in part due to resistance among parents to a new progressive education agenda that prioritised issues such as race, slavery and gender. State-wide polls taken just before the election showed Governor-elect Gregg Youngkin beat Democrat Terry McCauliffe by 15 points among parents.

Yet educational excess was not the only policy area that hurt the Democrats. Overall, the election was won in the Northern Virginia suburbs where the GOP reduced the large Trump deficit in half from 2020. Here, as across the state, the sagging economy and rampaging inflation will have dominated this election; exit polls show that taxes and economic worries were even larger factors than education, pushing voters towards Youngkin.

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Not surprisingly the egomaniacal Trump and his minions will claim credit for the GOP gains — Republicans also won Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor race, the state Legislature and possibly the Attorney General — as their own. This is true in part, the Republican base in the state’s rural hinterlands overwhelmingly opted for Youngkin.

Some on the Right will no doubt view the elections an expression of “buyer remorse”, paving the way for a Trump restoration. Yet Trump, according to the national  polls, remains barely more popular than the hapless Joe Biden, and would still likely lose Virginia. He would probably lose many of the affluent suburbs and, unlike Terry McCauliffe, would stimulate progressive voters and minorities to the polls.

In some sense Youngkin may have found the secret sauce for post-Trump Republicans — genuflect to Dr Demento, but don’t have him over for dinner, or brunch, or even in your state. While the Democrats focused on Trump — Biden cited Trump’s name 24 times during a campaign appearance on McAuliffe’s behalf last week — Youngkin sensibly zeroed in on the issues that matter most to your regular suburban family: public safety, schools and taxes. He realised that even moderate, liberal parents do not want racialism brought back into the schools, even if it’s introduced not by neo-Confederates, but impassioned social justice warriors.

His message helped him raise GOP shares, particularly among younger and middle aged voters, where Trump had been trounced in 2020, by double digits. He made a less impressive showing with minorities, who account for roughly a third of the state’s population, although he did win 30% more African-American votes — a key constituency in the former Confederate capital of Richmond in particular — than Trump. The GOP also was wise to nominate a former Marine and Jamaican immigrant, Winsome Sears, for Lieutenant Governor, who may have out-performed Youngkin in the race. Nominating and even electing racial minorities may be dismissed as “tokenism” by many, but ignores the fact that many minorities, and particularly immigrants, are more culturally conservative than the average American.

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Yet Youngkin’s challenges, and those of the national GOP, remain enormous, including a national media which will follow and magnify every Gubernatorial misstep. His path to success could easily be thrown off-course by the extreme agenda of the Right, which too often matches in many ways the authoritarianism of the progressive Left. Texas, where the Right seeks to undermine local powers and is focused on issues such as abortion, could be a negative model in more centrist places like Virginia, and other bellwether states.

But these challenges are chopped liver compared to what the Democrats now face. Clearly    the far-Left agenda is not popular even in safely blue areas. In a sharp reversal from early in the pandemic, the desire for more government has fallen to barely 40%, while support for the huge Green New Deal remains tepid at best. On Tuesday, Minneapolis overwhelmingly rejected a police defunding initiative and Eric Adams, a former cop and centrist-sounding Democrat, became Mayor, succeeding the unpopular Leftist Bill de Blasio while defeating his ideological heirs.

The problem the Democrats face is that the progressive agenda now increasingly dominates the party, with even the redoubtable Nancy Pelosi seeming to be led around by boisterously socialist members of the caucus. Along with their powerful allies in the public employee unions, they have tied Biden to a radical programme that would embrace CRT, undermine America’s still-large energy industry, support steps to densify the suburbs and turn against Israel. Suffice it to say that these are not winning positions in much of the country.

Increasingly, the progressives and Biden are increasingly desperate. They seem desperate to impose a radical agenda now, in part because they fear the country, which rejects many of their priorities, will destroy their tiny majority, itself a gift from Trump’s idiotic post-election behaviour, next year. Meanwhile, Biden’s assumed successor, Kamala Harris, has polled badly or worse than her boss.

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Successful parties intuit when to shift Right or Left and focus on issues with wide appeal. But Biden seems intent on stumbling through his Presidency as he carries the agenda of those, like Senator Bernie Sanders, who opposed his nomination. McAuliffe may have run a bad campaign, but he also was a victim of the remarkable incompetence, and poor communications, coming from the White House.

If the Democrats are to succeed, what they need is an answer to GOP populism that does not focus on cultural issues. Rather than pin Donald Trump on his tail, they should have gone after Youngkin’s background as co-CEO of the ultra-connected private equity fund Carlyle group. Fundamentally, non-racial social democratic programs of expanding health care, an infrastructure programme focused on roads and bridges, a clear strategy to deal with China all could work to expand, not shrink, the party base.

But this is not the path they have chosen. They still hope that by reviving the Trumpian ghost, enough centrists will go their way. But this will never work: you can’t win the centre while clinging on to the least popular parts of the progressive agenda.

I have sympathy with some critiques advanced by friends on the Right, of the excesses and uncounted costs of feminism. I have made a number of those critiques myself.

But I’m often frustrated by conservatives’ refusal to engage with feminist arguments or history much beyond the ‘pop’ versions you might find in the pages of Vox. The result is, regrettably, a Right-wing treatment of the women’s movement that is often as ignorant of what it decries as modern liberal feminists are of the conservative case against abortion.

We can do better. And we must, because today defending women’s interests is properly, and rightly, a defence of the family. Which is to say of all humans  including men – understood as relational beings.

This isn’t easy to see from a conservative vantage-point that blames feminism for many modern societal ills. Some of this critique is not without justice. But nor is the women’s movement without justice.

I don’t believe in progress, in the ‘arc of history’ sense. Nor do I believe that there exists an eternal conspiracy against women, called ‘patriarchy’. Worked free of these fairy tales, what we think of today as ‘feminism’ is a story of economic transitions.

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Specifically, it’s a story of how men and women re-negotiated life in common, in response first to the transition into the industrial era, then into twentieth-century market society. If everyone today seems to be arguing about men and women again, it’s because we’re in the throes of another economic transition.

To illustrate, I’ll take a short detour through that story. Of course this is complex, and varied by factors such as class, race and geography. But since what we think of as ‘feminism’ today is mainly driven by bourgeois white American women, and serves their class interests, I’ll focus on their story.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century America was mostly agrarian. The typical American matron was a disciplined, skilled, devout individual who worked alongside her husband in a productive household. She processed raw materials and foodstuffs produced by male family members into meals, clothing and so on, usually while caring for multiple children.The patriarchal legal system of ‘coverture’, which subsumed her legal personhood and property into that of her husband, rendered her technically a subordinate class of citizen. It also served to shield her from market pressures.

By the end of the nineteenth century, though, America was more industrial than agrarian. Families were smaller. Work took place outside the home, forcing a much sharper split between sex roles. In the new private household, the bourgeois woman was more economically dependent than her agrarian grandmother. Her main activities were the education of children, the management of servants and the consumption of goods produced elsewhere. She may have been more materially comfortable. But this woman had in many respects less agency than her foremothers.

This prompted a frenzy of debate about sex roles. Some women moralised the new feminine role. They framed the home as sanctuary from competitive life in America’s capitalist economy, and the non-working bourgeois housewife as its guardian. Her task was to tend this sanctuary, and to shape the children whose ability to flourish in industrial society depended on having the right moral and intellectual education. This was the so-called ‘cult of domesticity’.

But it takes a while for social norms to catch up with changing material conditions. The old legal system of ‘coverture’ still existed. Women had lost their agency in the agrarian productive household, and as yet acquired no other kind. The result was an economic and political helplessness that resulted in some deep injustices. It was this imbalance that drove the first feminist campaigns for property ownership and enfranchisement.

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Fast forward a century. Labour-saving devices and booming consumerism have shifted society once again. This set off another round of re-negotiation between the sexes as to the proper division of roles. Phyllis Schlafly observed that women were liberated more by the washing machine than feminism. And for bourgeois twentieth-century housewives, labour-saving devices combined with an increasingly atomised, individualistic social world to trigger a renewed search for agency, this time within the workplace.

I take this detour into women’s history to illustrate a core underlying argument. In each case, sex roles have been re-negotiated not by some abstract process of moral advancement but in response to changing material conditions. And in each case, this has been necessary because social and legal norms change more slowly.

So what about the central event in twentieth-century feminism: the sexual revolution? I come to this separately because in my view the sexual revolution was not the start but the end of feminism.

In its nineteenth and early twentieth-century incarnations, the women’s movement sought a positive negotiation of sex roles for prevailing material conditions, in the interests of life in common. But feminism in this sense ended in the 1960s. It was killed by the twin technology shocks of contraception and abortion.

Up to that point, the women’s movement encompassed both women who understood personhood in the context of family life – women as relational beings – and those who argued for women to be treated primarily as individuals, irrespective of the givens of sex or relational obligations. Medical control of fertility constituted a fundamental material change to this debate: it enabled the final victory of the individualist side.

As my friend Erika Bachiochi has argued, treating access to legal abortion as a necessary precondition for personhood implies a liberal male-centric understanding of what a person is: a radically separate individual. Within that framework there’s no conceptual language, for example, to describe the ‘more than one but less than two’ nature of pregnancy, or the radical sense of merged selfhood that comes with mothering a newborn baby.

For women to be human on this model, we must have total ownership over all these aspects of our bodies that differ from those of males. Even a conflict between total autonomy and an unborn human life must be resolved for autonomy.

There exist feminist thinkers who contest this, but they have been marginal since the 1960s. For the mainstream, the entrenchment of this radical bodily autonomy in law as a baseline for human personhood signalled a conclusive defeat of relational feminism.

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Instead of calling for both men and women to embrace a human duty to be dependent others, we embraced a supposedly empowering pursuit of universal, de-sexed radical individualism, and outsourced care to the welfare state.

Received opinion today frames this shift as a victory. Conservative critiques of feminism usually boil down to enumerations of its uncounted costs: the meltdown of family life, the tiny infants in daycare, the degradation of sexual intimacy, the collapsing fertility rate, and so on.

But we need to understand that what we’re fighting is not feminism, properly understood, but something I’ve characterised elsewhere as bio-libertarianism. A worldview that for fifty years now has claimed to act in women’s interests but is increasingly obviously at odds with those interests. It’s a worldview that believes human freedom necessitates radical unmooring from the givens of our bodies.

The transgender writer Jennifer Finney Boylan recently observed that the campaigns for medical abortion and transgender surgeries have a great deal in common. This is correct. Both causes champion the right of atomised individuals to exert absolute mastery over their bodies. They are not feminist but bio-libertarian.

I disagree with Boylan only on whether this is desirable. Because conditions have now changed again. And our norms and laws haven’t caught up yet.

Bio-libertarian causes may have appeared in women’s emancipatory interests, in a broadly democratic consumer society. That era retained some shared social and cultural norms, along with a sincere belief that things could go on getting better, richer, freer, more comfortable forever. As such, working loose those old-fashioned social norms and physiological givens seemed an unalloyed good.

That world is gone. There are no shared norms. We’re past peak oil. Living standards are falling. So is life expectancy. Variously in the name of economic progress, digital disintermediation, Covid, net zero or the Great Reset, the middle class is being methodically cannibalised to shore up the 1%. Pluralism has birthed a Hobbesian moral anarchy, held together only by the technologies that mediate our meme wars.

This is the new normal and it’s not going away. Against this backdrop, the interests of men and women no longer align with the bio-libertarian agenda of mastery over the body. And this brings me to the three main types of response I notice to the new tension between emerging conditions and our legacy social and cultural frameworks: trads, cads and radfems.

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Very reductively, these three positions break down as follows. The Trads say: all this could be fixed if only we could put second-wave feminism back in its box, and return to something more like the cult of domesticity. This has the appeal of both familiarity and nostalgia.

But we no longer live in the industrial society that produced those roles. The economic landscape has changed beyond all recognition. Arguing over the merits of those changes won’t reverse them. And today’s reality is that the ‘Trad’ argument is pure fantasy fiction, for the millions of twentysomethings who can barely make rent, let alone support an unwaged carer for little kids.

Nor is the sexual revolution going back in its box, a fact that today produces ‘Cads’ of both sexes. Men and women who have internalised the radically individualist, bio-libertarian belief that sex is merely a fun leisure activity that can be managed via contract theory.

Among high-status men, this looks like Tinder hookups summoned as casually as a Deliveroo pizza. For the less fortunate it looks like the embittered life of a porn-sick ‘incel’. Among women, the same dynamic looks like classes for college freshmen on how to launch yourself on OnlyFans; like consenting reluctantly to violent or degrading sexual practices in the hope that it will make a boy like you enough to hold your hand in public.

For both sexes, it means an interpersonal landscape marinaded in pornography, actively hostile to intimacy, and governed by a false belief that male and female sexuality are the same. Under its rubric the pursuit of pleasure becomes a degraded search for thrills: one which leaves both sexes numb and jaded, scarred by having traded in love for violence.

The cads have accepted this situation and resigned themselves to just scavenging whatever kicks they can get. Others revolt against this nihilistic nightmare by calling for the re-imposition of power, in the interests of a final victory for one sex over the other. In this sense, ‘radfems’ in fact encompass both feminists and anti-feminists. They have a surprising amount in common.

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Radical feminism is a rich and fractious tradition that I clearly can’t do justice to here. But its contemporary inheritors take for granted the individualistic liberal anthropology I have described. The anti-feminism that opposes this view is just as individualist. It simply prefers not to extend selfhood to women.

Both believe in the same patriarchy. They differ only on its merits. Both are similarly hostile to interdependence. Both these groups, in different ways, argue for the use of power to settle the war between the sexes, in either for or against the “patriarchy”.

These groups are both wrong. Because patriarchy doesn’t exist, either as a good thing or a bad. What does exist, has always existed, is the ongoing negotiation between men and women, over how we can best live together in the world as it is.

And we are in the throes of renegotiating now. For the age of abundance is over. Neo-feudalism is already here. It’s underwritten by an emerging bio-security state that disciplines and surveils our bodies even as it proposes to terraform our souls. It would de-regulate human nature itself. Open up our bodies as markets for biotech. Applaud males for embracing a surgically feminised ‘gender identity’, while re-branding females as ‘gestators’, chestfeeders’, ‘birthing bodies’ or just ‘uterus-havers’.

Men and women face this disunited; no longer sure how to live together. Family formation is collapsing. Anti-natalism is hip. Millions of young people are trapped in a hell of transactional sexuality ordered not to love, or meaning, or the future, but to bare, squalid, hyper-mediated commerce.

The pursuit of freedom is not just delivering diminishing returns. It has long since turned against women. It is now turning against life itself. What we need to face this challenge is not more freedom. It’s more and better obligations. That means, for feminists, a reckoning with some of the unpaid debts of the age of emancipation. It also means that we’ve run out of road for the kind of movement that seeks to pry women free of our fathers, brothers, husbands and sons.

To respond, first and foremost we must stop treating the question of family as a women’s issue. It’s a human one. And we need to accept that men and women are equal in dignity and personhood but different in physiology. The core question is how we reconcile our interests.

At the centre of this is how we understand marriage. The twentieth-century consumer society trivialised and individualised marriage, as a vehicle for personal fulfilment. That no longer works. But marriage does, if we pry it free of the ‘patriarchy’ baggage and treat it as the first and most crucial step in a fightback against radical atomisation, and for life in common.

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At the bigger scale we must fight for policies that support this. That defend the human body against enclosure by biotech, human interiority against enclosure by digital transparency, human desire against enclosure by the sex industry. That defend children against enclosure by ‘reproductive healthcare’ or identity medicine. That support family formation, incentivise solidarity in marriage, and proactively seek to shield the domain of human intimacy from the market.

To those of my feminist friends about to denounce me as a reactionary, I say: under current conditions, defending women means defending the human. And if you do that, people are going to call you reactionary. A feminism fighting back against the bio-libertarian nightmare must centre embodied care and dependency. Marriage has the power to convene radical loyalty, in the interests of life in common. For a feminism that centres care, this is self-evidently a good thing. So here the interests of twenty-first century feminism converge with those of conservatives.

Such a feminism also defends human nature and the body, against technologies that would remodel us in the name of utopia. Commercial surrogacy, transgender ‘medicine’ and experimental human-animal chimeras are just the start. Resistance requires a willingness to re-open the question of those embodied ways in which men and women are different. Here too the interests of feminism converge with those of conservatives.

To those well-meaning progressives who argue “you can’t be a feminist and not be for freedom”, I say: wake up. The agenda you ushered in is now the stuff of nightmares. To those on the Right who say “feminism got us here; you’ve made your bed ladies, now lie in it” I say: I get where you’re coming from, but don’t be stupid. You might enjoy watching trans activism abolish sex dimorphism, to own the feminists, but the ideology is coming for your kids too.

At its best, conservatism has always been pragmatic. It seeks the eternal Good, not from nostalgia for bygone days but from where we are. We can’t go back, but the future doesn’t have to look like a nihilistic hell, or like the final victory of one sex over the other.

In terms of how men and women live together, there may be nothing left to conserve. But that means there is everything to build. What we have is the rubble. Our bodies. Each other. And our willingness to try. It’s time to begin.

This is a version of a speech delivered at NatCon 2. 

In complexity theory, the term ‘emergence’ is used to describe a complex, higher order that arises out of the seemingly uncoordinated behaviour of individuals. The principal threat to liberalism today is an emergent authoritarianism, not a top-down form of the kind we find in China or Turkey.

Consider the case of Kathleen Stock, a philosopher and feminist who defends the right of women to restrict access to some women-only spaces to those who are biologically female. Stock was last week forced to resign her position at the University of Sussex after being subjected to a campaign of harassment from trans activists and their fellow travellers. Her decision to quit was not preceded by a demand by her bosses to step aside. Instead, a number of her colleagues at Sussex, as well as students and administrators at the university, created the toxic environment that forced her out.

Having experienced a milder form of the same treatment for criticising the excesses of ‘anti-racist’ activism, I completely understand why she left. Even though the university belatedly stood up for Stock’s right to free speech, pressure from her peers — especially when combined with an activist-led disciplinary process — creates a repressive climate for those who dare to dissent.

This is, of course, not confined to the UK. Across the Anglosphere, cancellation campaigns are soaring: the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)’s ‘Scholars under Fire’ database records a fivefold increase in attempts to terminate American academics between 2015 and 2020, with students often leading the charge. But what makes the news is just the tip of a vast iceberg when it comes to hostility and self-censorship.

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My own work shows that in North America and Britain, around three quarters of academics in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) are on the Left. Three-quarters of SSH faculty in Britain endorse political correctness because it protects minorities, while just a fifth oppose it for stifling free speech. In the struggle between what Teresa Bejan calls ‘equal speech’ and free speech, many come down in favour of the former.

Even though it’s likely that most academics have been horrified by Dr Stock’s treatment, they still have an instinctive sympathy for disadvantaged identity groups — including those she is alleged to have hurt. So when activists smear Dr Stock as a transphobe, they make her radioactive to an important share of colleagues and students, who pull away out of a combination of moral disapproval and fear of guilt-by-association. Even in anonymous surveys, I have found that barely 1 in 3 North American and British academics are comfortable sitting down to lunch with a female academic who supports banning trans women from women’s shelters.

Cass Sunstein writes that the more one’s workplace doubles as a social community, the stronger its ability to force dissenters to conform to sacred values. And it is this which partly explains why Dr Stock was so vulnerable in the first place. Collegiate interaction and collaboration are a staple of academia. ‘Being a good colleague’ is not just an informal norm; it is often part of an academic’s formal appraisal. Peers review our presentations and papers, as well as the applications for grants and promotion that can make or break our career. Fellow academics also populate most levels of university governance, from a departmental teaching coordinator to the faculty Senate.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that biases and taboos pervade the system. Since over 40% of American academics wouldn’t hire a Trump supporter and a third of their British counterparts wouldn’t hire someone who voted to leave the European Union, the unorthodox keep their views to themselves. 70% of American conservative SSH academics say they self-censor, as do a third of British academics overall. The situation is similar in other ideologically-slanted industries such as journalism or the arts  — if anything, academics, once you control for their ideology, are more pro-free speech than others.

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That, however, is not saying much. There can be little doubt the campuses remain ruled by what Sunstein terms ‘outrage entrepreneurs’, the secular preachers of today’s cultural socialism — an ideology which holds that cultural narratives and signifiers reproduce group inequality. These outrage entrepreneurs compete to spot signs of the devil (i.e. racism, transphobia, sexism) all around them. Often this takes the form of redefining innocuous words, such as ‘master bedroom’ or ‘spooky’, as racist, while competing to erase the memory of ‘problematic’ historical figures.

In this sense, it is far from a new phenomenon. Just like the fundamentalist preachers who drove the Great Awakenings of American Protestantism or the Azusa Street Revival in the early 20^th century, a new priesthood is powering cultural socialism’s Third Great Awokening.

And they are succeeding beyond the wildest imagination of illiberal leftists such as Herbert Marcuse or the censorious student radicals of the Sixties. FIRE’s huge survey of 37,000 American university students shows that 75% of those in Liberal Arts colleges believe that shouting down a speaker with whom they disagree is sometimes acceptable; 70% of all students think a professor who says something that offends them should be reported to the administration.

Given censorious attitudes like these are so pervasive, it seems unlikely that they will grow out of their illiberalism. Indeed, this seems almost certain given the findings of a recent academic paper on white liberal Americans and their approach to toleration. The General Social Survey has been asking the same questions since 1972 about who should have the right to publicly speak. While American ‘liberals’ remain more tolerant than conservatives overall, the trend toward rising toleration — in relation to platforming racist speakers — began to go into reverse around 2000. Since the turn of the millennium, toleration has been steadily dropping. As Sean Stevens notes, Smith College students in 2000 and 2016, filling out the same survey, became 20-30% less favourable to free speech.

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Trans activism's war on solidarity

By Julie Bindel

It is somewhat baffling, then, that classical liberals are optimistic about the future; they have taken to congratulating themselves lately because much of the mainstream media is largely onside, while new organisations such as the Academic Freedom Alliance or Free Speech Union are doing excellent work defending victims of cancel culture.

But these are more a palliative than a cure. The demographic momentum of decades of cultural socialist control over education shows no sign of waning. The treatment of Dr Stock surely demonstrates that things will get worse before they get better.

In order to turn the tide of emergent authoritarianism, the Government must step in when institutions violate the laws and values forged during the West’s period of expanding liberty. Legislation such as the UK’s Academic Freedom Bill is required to proactively uphold civil liberties and guard against political discrimination. Beyond this, governments must restructure school curricula to ensure that students learn as much about the struggle for liberty and the evils of utopianism as they do about the fight against prejudice.

But even this is not sufficient. Ultimately, emergent authoritarianism will continue to spawn new outgrowths until we recalibrate the taboos around race, sexuality and gender that have been widening for decades. Taboos activate our disgust reflex, leading to a black-and-white approach that is anti-intellectual, and must give way to a more nuanced and proportional form of social sanction of the kind we apply to those who mistreat people on the basis of other characteristics.

This means applying the principle of charity in interpreting people’s intentions, allowing for second chances before doling out the maximum penalty, and creating space for forgiveness. Until we achieve this, there will be plenty more Kathleen Stocks in the coming years.

She noticed something. When she interviewed the men’s rights activists, she was enraged by their sexism: but when she went back and transcribed the interviews, she found that the things she had been enraged by were not as clear as she had thought. “I would often hear an innocent and valid point that a MRA would make,” she says, “and in my head I would add on a sexist or anti-woman spin, assuming that was what he wanted to say but didn’t.”

If a man said that there are 2,000 domestic violence shelters for women in the US and only one for men, for instance, she would hear “and therefore we should defund the women’s ones”, rather than “so we should fund more men’s ones”. It’s an interesting watch.

The blogger John Nerst points out that, whether or not you agree with her, there’s something interesting going on here. Her brain was doing something incredibly sophisticated. The MRAs’ comments were being filtered, or spun, or edited, before they reached her conscious mind. They were given tags: untrustworthy, sexist, anti-woman.

As far as her consciousness was concerned, she wasn’t choosing to label them like that: they came to her pre-labelled, by some hidden subroutine in the brain. It was only when she watched it back later, and her own video diaries from the time, that she was able to spot the labels. And the labelling involves quite high-level ideas, things like “misogyny”, not just lizard-brain concepts like “danger, food, potential mate”.

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How not to talk to a science denier

By Tom Chivers

I thought of Jaye, and the strange filtering that our brains do, when I read about the probably nonexistent wave of ivermectin overdoses filling Midwestern US hospitals and preventing medics from treating gunshot victims.

This purported wave got a lot of coverage. Rolling Stone “Gunshot Victims Left Waiting as Horse Dewormer Overdoses Overwhelm Oklahoma Hospitals, Doctor Says.” The Guardian: “Oklahoma hospitals deluged by ivermectin overdoses, doctor says”. The Independent: “Doctor says gunshot victims forced to wait for treatment as Oklahoma hospitals overwhelmed by coronavirus patients.” It’s taken from a report from a local TV channel, which interviewed a rural Oklahoman emergency-room doctor.

As far as I can tell, it’s not true at all. Dr Jason McElyea, the doctor in question, appears to have been saying two things: 1) that he’s seen some ivermectin overdoses and 2) that emergency rooms are overwhelmed, presumably by Covid. The original news video splices these two points together, but I don’t think it’s what McElyea meant; in a follow-up interview with the BBC, he clarified that there was only a “handful” of overdoses, and that the strain on hospital staff was mainly from a surge in Covid cases. One Oklahoman hospital said it hadn’t seen any cases; others may have, but it makes it less likely that there’s a plague of the stuff. (It’s worth noting that Right-wing outlets didn’t cover themselves in glory either: they reported the hospital saying it hadn’t had any cases as disproving the whole story, even though McElyea had never mentioned that hospital and it was in a different bit of Oklahoma.)

To be clear, ivermectin almost certainly doesn’t help prevent or treat Covid and it can be bad for you. But it seems unlikely that there are so many people ingesting it that it’s affecting hospital capacity.

The American Association of Poison Control Centers has released data up to the end of August, showing a marked rise in ivermectin cases — about ten times as many this August as there were in August 2019. But while a tenfold rise sounds impressive, it’s only up from about 40 cases a month in 2019 to 450 a month now, and most of those cases had either no effect or minor effects. For context, about 1,600 people are being hospitalised with Covid every day in Oklahoma alone. It’s silly to take ivermectin, but people doing it are not putting huge strain on the US health service.

The ivermectin story is far from the only one recently. The Guardian among other places, recently reported a story of an “anti-trans Instagram post”, which made “unsubstantiated allegations” about a male-bodied person in a spa exposing themself to women and girls at an LA spa. The piece said experts called it “a case study in how viral misinformation can result in violence”, linking “anti-trans and far-right movements, including QAnon conspiracy theorists, who believe that a cabal of elite pedophiles is manipulating the American government”.

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What we're not being told about ME

By Tom Chivers

There was a kind of inevitability about the follow-up story last week which found that, in fact, a registered sex offender named Darren Merager had been charged with indecent exposure at the spa. Merager, a trans woman, denies the charges; but at the very least, it’s not a clear-cut example of “viral misinformation” or a conspiracy theory worthy of being linked to QAnon.

As a bit of an aside, this isn’t supposed to happen. The Left views itself as the defender of truth and accuracy, not a purveyor of mistruth. Recently, I reviewed a book, How to Talk to a Science Denier. It was not, I felt, particularly useful. But one thing that I found revealing was the author’s long discussion of whether “left-wing science denial” existed. He chose one example — Left-wing opposition to genetically modified organisms, specifically on safety grounds — and concluded that it sort of did but not really. He based a lot of his thinking on the research of Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist at the University of Bristol. There is, I think, a fairly well-established idea that the Left is the “side” of science and evidence, and the Right is the “side” of science “denial”.

I find that strange, because I can think of quite a few areas in which elite Left-wing or liberal opinion doesn’t sit well with mainstream scientific findings.

For instance: the UK Green Party wants to “phase out” nuclear power. Is that “science denial”? I don’t know, but I think the consensus scientific position is that nuclear power is extremely safe and carbon-efficient.

And the idea that human behaviour and society are in some important way the product of evolution has been so profoundly uncomfortable to people on the Left that as far back as 1978 people broke into a lecture the biologist Edward Wilson, shouting “Racist Wilson, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide” and throwing water over him, after he had written a book, Sociobiology, which was mainly about the behaviour of insects but which speculated that future science could shed some light on human behaviour. Is that “science denial”? Well, again, that’s a question of definitions, but blank slatism is certainly not directly in line with modern scientific findings.

Or take IQ. Your score on an IQ test predicts your success in life pretty well; your career outcomes and earnings, your school results, even your lifespan. It’s also highly heritable. You can find people denying those facts on the Left much more easily than you can find them on the Right, just as you can find people claiming that biological sex isn’t real.

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Who would kill children to save the planet?

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My point isn’t that Left-wing people do this more than Right-wing people, or even that they’re equivalent: I suspect that if you could find some reasonable way of defining terms like “science denial” or “misinformation” (and “Right-wing” and “Left-wing”), you’d probably end up finding that it’s more prevalent on the Right. But, at least in the largely Left-wing or centrist circles I inhabit, it’s almost axiomatic that misinformation is what the Right do. There’s a serious strain of thought that thinks we are the correct ones, and they are the wrong ones.

But the desire to show your political opponents in the worst possible light, or to believe things that are politically convenient rather than things that aren’t, is entirely bipartisan. It’s just easier to spot when the enemy is doing it.

But what interests me is the question of whether people (on the Left or Right) do this on purpose: are they consciously misrepresenting their opponents and ignoring inconvenient truths, or is it a subconscious, automatic thing?

I wrote some months ago about people switching between different definitions of words in highly charged culture-war debates, allowing them to make claims like “cancel culture is/isn’t real”. I’d assumed it was mainly unconscious, but something that people said to me was: this is entirely deliberate. They define words in ways that gain them cultural power: so a Left-winger might very deliberately define “racism” to include “anything that leads to negative outcomes for non-white people”, and a Right-winger might define it as “only explicit acts of intentional racism by an individual”, so as to make the problem as big or as small as you can. Certainly it seems to happen too often for it to be accidental.

Under that model, people share the ivermectin story or the trans-woman-in-the-spa story to damage their political opponents, knowing or not caring that it’s not true. Ivermectin is a Right-coded thing, so showing that Trump-voting rural Oklahomans are taking it in their thousands and gumming up emergency wards shows just how stupid they are.

But the Cassie Jaye MRA thing, I think, reveals another angle. As Nerst describes it, Jaye’s conscious brain wasn’t choosing the most uncharitable interpretations of what the MRAs were saying: her subconscious brain only presented her with uncharitable options. Her conscious, reasoning mind, the bit of us that we consider ourselves, thought it was simply reporting reality, but in fact the version of reality that arrived in front of it had already been screened, and only the politically convenient bits were available to her. Nerst calls this process of only choosing from pre-screened options “semitentionality”: it’s neither an honest mistake nor a cynical misrepresentation, but some weird different third option.

I think that’s what’s going on when people read stories about ivermectin or trans women in spas. It’s not that they deliberately choose the interpretation most convenient to their pre-existing beliefs, or that they’re accidentally choosing the most convenient interpretation time and time again. It’s that the world our brains present to us is brilliantly constructed so that our friends are right and good and the enemy is bad and wrong. It’s not clear how we can improve the situation — but being wary of sharing any politically convenient stories on social media might be a good start.

To put it rather crudely, some consider themselves to be “virtually normal” (as Andrew Sullivan’s 1995 book argued). By which I mean they want nothing more than equality before the law so that that they can get on with living lives which are pretty much — except in the bedroom — just like everyone else’s. Others, though, consider themselves to be outlaws: their experience of same-sex desire placing them outside of mainstream, “heteronormative” society and they (at least in the case of gay men) would never be so bourgeois as to restrict sexual activity to the bedroom.

It’s the conservatives versus the radicals: the former position is the traditional “equality” argument; the latter is the more “liberationist” one.

But this good-natured debate is as nothing compared to the division that has opened up in lesbian and gay communities following Stonewall’s 2015 decision to re-formulate homosexuality around the nebulous concept of “gender identity”. Its policy today, which it has promoted through its Diversity Champions scheme, is that biological sex is less important than self-declared “gender identity” — an inner feeling of being either man or woman, male or female, which, according to Stonewall, is an identity we all possess. It follows that biological males can be lesbians, and biological females can be gay men. To disagree is transphobic.

It has riven us like never before, and only now is society waking up to this as a slew of private and public institutions pull out of the Diversity Champions scheme. Ofcom is the latest to quit stating that taking part “poses a conflict or risk of perceived bias”.

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By Maya Forstater

The breadth of support Stonewall enjoyed until now was predicated on its small-c conservative agenda; lobbying for legislative equality and wider social acceptance of LGB people, and seeing legislative equality and social acceptance as linked. Its consensus-seeking agreeableness enabled buy-in from politicians of Left and Right. In particular, the issues of civil partnerships and same-sex marriage enabled socially conservative politicians to be absorbed into the equality project.

For radical liberationists, a background of legislative equality was tacitly welcome as a precondition to a more disruptive ultimate goal. On the whole, whether you wanted assimilation or a radically “queer” reshaping of society, Stonewall’s activities were largely uncontroversial among lesbian and gay people.

But the gender identity handbrake-turn fractured that consensus. Stonewall’s strategy for dealing with the fallout has been to insist that there can be “no debate”, characterising entreaties to discussion as equal to debating trans people’s very existence.

The “no debate” strategy was intended to delegitimise opponents’ views while the charity worked behind the scenes with the Government to drive through its preferred changes to the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act before critical voices could get a public hearing.

Today, the “no debate” shield is starting to fail. This is largely down to all those women who refused to concede that a man who claims to to “identify” as a woman counts as a woman in exactly the same way as a biological female does. Stonewall’s stance on gender identity, and the public consultation on the GRA in 2018, created some powerfully angry grassroots women’s organisations, such as Woman’s Place UK and Fair Play For Women. It also produced the LGB Alliance, founded by seasoned lesbian activists Kate Harris and Bev Jackson. (Full disclosure: I was involved in the early planning of LGBA.)

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This means that there are now two lobbying charities aiming to represent lesbian and gay people. Stonewall, which argues that the policies and principles of LGB Alliance (prioritising biological sex over gender identity) are transphobic, and LGB Alliance, which argues that the policies and principles of Stonewall (prioritising gender identity over biological sex) are homophobic.

Nothing represents the extent of this schism more powerfully than the intervention of Simon Callow — a gay man who came out publicly in 1984, five years before Stonewall was founded, when gay and lesbian people were commonly hounded by the tabloid press, and when the age of consent for gay men was still 21. Earlier this week Callow pointed out Stonewall’s “strange turn to the tyrannical” regarding self-identification. And described the “extraordinarily unproductive militancy” that surrounds its current position.

As for the charity’s ideological shift, he said: “When it impinges on women’s rights, hard-won women’s rights, the right to exclusive spaces for women, away from any threat at all — I think that’s a very serious issue.”

This must be discussed, he pointed out reasonably.

But reason is in short supply. The last few years of gay and lesbian politics has turned the consensus which held for thirty years upside down. Our most reliable lobbying charity, within which most of us used to be able to see at least something of ourselves, has become radicalised and divisive, igniting and reframing that discussion which had simmered in the background but never seemed existentially important in the way that it now does, namely — what does it mean to be gay or lesbian? Who are we?

For many of us, Stonewall’s position conflicts profoundly with how we feel about our gay or lesbian nature. Let me put it bluntly; I experience sexual desire for men, not human beings of either sex who claim to identify as men. My sexual orientation is towards male bodies — and yes, that means male genitalia too. If you explore this on Twitter (and I don’t recommend it) you will encounter people minimising same-sex desire to “genital preference”, arguing that it is inherently transphobic. Stonewall has avoided endorsing this view — but it has also avoided speaking up for specifically same-sex desire.

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By Jonny Best

For three decades, Stonewall was broadly representative of the majority of people for whom it lobbied. There was only occasional dissent — a minor kerfuffle over whether or not it should follow up its successful campaign for civil partnerships with lobbying for same-sex marriage, for example. But now, through the fog and noise, one thing is becoming clear; Stonewall’s legitimacy is eroding, and with it the illusion that there is one LGBT community, to which the vast majority of us affiliate.

I jumped at the chance, even though I am a member of the Labour party, and we worked amicably together for the next three years. Fast forward to 2021: Johnson is prime minister, Lord Greenhalgh (as he now is) is a government minister and I am out. Now I am in a peculiar situation: I have voted Labour all my life, yet was brought into City Hall by a Conservative administration — and sacked by its Labour successor.

The dismissal arrived last Friday afternoon, as I was writing and giving interviews about the dreadful murders in Plymouth less than 24 hours earlier (I have written a book about the relationship between misogyny, domestic abuse and terrorism). The last thing I expected, in the middle of such horror, was to be sacked by email.

After eight years of unpaid work on behalf of women and girls in London, it seems reasonable to expect that Sadiq Khan or Sophie Linden, the deputy mayor who replaced Greenhalgh, would have wanted to tell me themselves. But I have not heard a word from Khan and I only had a call from Linden yesterday after the Times published a story about the incident. Before that, all I had received was a series of diary notifications from her office, cancelling all the meetings I was supposed to have with her over the next twelve months.

The news was delivered in an email from Diana Luchford, a former civil servant at the Home Office, who is now CEO of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. I had to read it twice before the meaning sank in: I am out, thus removing independent scrutiny at a moment when the behaviour of the Metropolitan police towards women has been fiercely criticised.

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Take the kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer, followed the force’s callous handling of a vigil to commemorate her. Or its failure to investigate when two murdered sisters, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, were reported missing last year. If ever an outside voice were needed to raise women’s anxieties at City Hall, it is surely now.

My sacking has been attributed to a “governance review”, even though I made it clear months ago that I wanted to stay on as Co-chair. Luchford’s email did offer a sop: that I could remain on the board as an “advisor”. But that would remove my influence over the agenda and access to important meetings behind the scenes.

As Co-Chair, I was able to make sure that vital issues raised by recent events were discussed. For example, I argued that we needed to know what the Metropolitan Police intend to do to improve the way they identify sexual predators in their own ranks, and to make sure that complaints of domestic abuse against serving officers are handled properly. I also expressed my concern, privately, that the Mayor’s focus on issues such as knife crime risked diverting attention from crimes against women, including black women in London who suffer disproportionately high levels of rape and sexual assault.

At the end of March, just weeks after the abduction of Ms Everard, the number of rapes reported in London reached a ten-year high. The figures are shocking, and I thought they would be discussed at the most recent meeting of the London Crime Reduction Board, which is chaired by the Mayor. When I asked why we were not talking about the rape statistics, I was told they would be on the agenda of the next meeting — in October.

Linden has insisted that the sacking has nothing do with my attempt to protect women-only spaces in refuges, which receive key funding from City Hall. Last year I became aware that some women’s organisations were becoming alarmed by tweets from the Mayor’s official Twitter account. They felt under growing pressure to admit male-bodied trans women — men who have not undergone surgery but “identify” as women — to spaces currently reserved for female victims of domestic violence. No one is suggesting that trans women who suffer domestic abuse don’t need services, but they should be provided without affecting the principle of women-only spaces.

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By Maya Forstater

“Trans women are women, trans men are men,” Khan declared in February, repeating the mantra of trans activists. “Trans people deserve the dignity and safety of being recognised as their gender,” he tweeted a few months later when it was reported that the government had dropped plans to allow people to self-identify as the other sex. “I’m dismayed that the Govt has made a U-turn on its own consultation to make the Gender Recognition Act more straightforward.”

It didn’t matter that trans activists were demanding almost total deregulation of the legal process of “changing” sex, which would make it less onerous than adopting a child or getting a driving licence. Or that self-ID has huge implications for women, most obviously for vulnerable women who need spaces away from men in refuges, hospitals and prisons. Sadiq Khan was fully on board — and had ignored requests from women’s organisations, including the Labour Women’s Declaration, for a meeting.

I discussed the Mayor’s tweets with Karen Ingala Smith, indomitable CEO of nia, the organisation that provides services to victims of sexual and domestic violence in east London. We decided to write to Linden, warning her about the impact Khan’s statements were having on organisations that depend on City Hall for funding: “How can it have anything other than a chilling effect when the Mayor publicly takes sides with a group of activists on such a contentious issue?” we asked.

We received an equivocating reply, repeating the Mayor’s view that “trans women are women” and making the dubious claim that the “basic human rights [of trans people] remain unmet”. Linden told us that the Mayor’s approach to providing services “is led by the needs of victims and survivors on a clear principle of non-discrimination”, a puzzling statement since women’s organisations are highly unlikely to discriminate on grounds of age, race, religion or disability.

They might exclude someone with male genitals from a women’s refuge — but that would be a lawful use of the exemptions in the 2010 Equality Act. We wrote again, seeking an assurance that no women’s organisation supported by the Mayor would be penalised financially for doing so. Linden did not reply.

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Then, last October, we wrote directly to Khan, reminding him that he voted for what is now the Equality Act when he was a Labour MP in 2009. “If you no longer support the Act in full, including the provision to restrict access on the ground of biological sex in certain circumstances, we believe that such a significant shift should be publicly acknowledged and debated,” we wrote. Ten months later, we are still waiting for a response.

Now I’ve been ousted. Yesterday, Linden took to Twitter to deny claims that I had been sacked after raising concerns about transwomen in refuges. She reiterated: “This is simply not true. The structure of all our boards at City Hall is being changed. [My dismissal] has nothing to do with any views Joan has expressed.” In response, all I can say is that I’ve spent years advocating for the safety of women and girls — and having an outside expert at City Hall seems to me as important as ever.

It was 1991, the height of the Gulf War, and the debate on militarism, masculine stereotypes and violence towards women was punctuated with references to testosterone. At one point, after he had nipped to the loo and topped up his glass, Reed leant over to kiss Millett — much to her disgust — leading one male guest to pronounce: “A man can never have too much [testosterone].”

In her new book, Testosterone: The Story of the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, Carole Hooven explores how the hormone is often presented as both a justification and excuse for male dominance over women. Women have far lower levels of testosterone, so it has often been argued that housework and childrearing come naturally to them. Men, on the other hand, are programmed to be hellbent on impregnating as many women as possible, fighting off male rivals and dragging a carcass home for dinner.

But as Hooven acknowledges in her fascinating book, despite the undeniable effect of the hormone on our behaviour, how we relate to others is based on evolving and complex external forces.

Both sexes produce testosterone, though men create up to twenty times more. Testosterone, then, is at the heart of the nature versus nurture debate. For feminists, it is our culture, rather than hormones, that most influences gendered behaviours. There are, for instance, enough studies which show that women enjoy plenty of sex and risk on par with the most testosterone-fuelled men.

It’s the same with male and female behaviour, neither of which can be reduced to binary Ken and Barbie stereotypes. As a lesbian and gender non-conforming feminist, I know this only too well. When I rejected traditional female toys and dress, I was frequently told I had too much testosterone and that was what made me a tomboy. Even into adult life, I have lost count of the times I have been told I’m a lesbian — or that I will grow a beard and never feel a desire to reproduce — because I have “too much testosterone”.

It’s a load of nonsense, but it raises an important question: how is it that the genetic and hormonal components of sex can create two distinctly different reproductive systems, and yet human male and female behaviour shows itself to be flexible, diverse and often surprisingly similar?

Hooven’s expertise is in natural sciences and biological anthropology — and the answer, she suggests, is that testosterone might strongly influence how we behave; too much of it can make males more aggressive, and those with raised levels often end up taking too many risks so they tend to crash and burn.

That may seem logical, but it does not explain violence against women or rape. As Cordelia Fine, author of the acclaimed Testosterone Rex (2017), points out most men are not violent, which leaves a hole in the theory that testosterone drives behaviour.

Nevertheless, if we are to properly understand sex differences, we still need to educate ourselves about testosterone. Crucially, the controversy around trans women in sport — namely that going through male puberty results not just in far higher levels of tesosterone but also greater bone and muscle mass — is tackled head-on by Hooven. “You may be wondering if natural variation in T [testosterone] levels has anything to do with being transgender in the first place,” she writes. “And given what we know about testosterone, that’s a logical question. The answer is, we don’t know.”

Indeed, Hooven found that there is not much relation between higher testosterone levels and performance among professional athletes when compared to others of the same sex. Between the two sexes, however, “the link is very much stronger”. And this is because “T levels are dramatically higher in males, and have a lot to do with the fact that they are stronger, faster and more aggressive than the vast majority of their female counterparts.” That is, of course, why we have sex-segregated sports in the first place.

If we accept that testosterone can cause aggression in males and change behaviour, which Hooven does, should it be used as an excuse in cases of male sexual assault? No, says Hooven, because even behaviour related to biology is not hardwired and unchangeable. Even if biology is a factor in social ill, it does not make it determined.

Yet it is disappointing that Hooven relies on questionable data to challenge the reality of male violence. For example, in picking apart the trope that male violence towards women is inevitable because it is hormone-driven, she looks to the violence perpetrated by women on male partners and concludes that, with caveats, women are as likely to be violent to male partners as vice-versa, but less likely to kill. I have campaigned to end violence towards women and girls for 40 years, and every bit of evidence from around the world concludes this is simply not the case.

But how much does testosterone affect the way men view women? One example Hooven relies on is that of trans man Griffin Hansbury and his reaction to T injections during the early days of his transition:

“I remember walking up Fifth Avenue, and there was a woman walking in front of me,” says Hansbury. “And she was wearing this little skirt and this little top. And I was looking at her ass. And I kept saying to myself, don’t look at it. Don’t look at it. And I kept looking at it. And I walked past her. And this voice in my head kept saying, turn around to look at her breasts …. It was like being in a pornographic movie house in my mind. And I couldn’t turn it off. I could not turn it off. Everything I looked at, everything I touched turned to sex.”

While even I, a hard-line social constructionist, concede that testosterone can cause strange behaviour and be as potent as oestrogen is for females, I strongly suspect there are other explanations for his behaviour. Surely, for example, we should put at least some of it down to the privilege and arrogance afforded to men, including trans men.

After all, Hansbury is still living in a world where male entitlement and lack of punishment can lead to the dehumanising and over-sexualisation of women. Hansbury’s testosterone-induced journey from his previous life as a self-described “butch dyke” who used to perform poetry about street harassment cannot be blamed on T alone.

As Hooven observes: “To bring about changes in male behaviour it is not necessary to depress testosterone. Changes in attitudes and culture can do that all by themselves.” She is right, even if the likes of Oliver Reed may suggest otherwise.