Mick Hartley

A Quillette editorial, Standing Up to the Gender Ideologues, rehearses all the recent cases where trans ideology has made the news – Jess de Wahls and the Royal Acedemy, Laurel Hubbard in the Olympics – and asks why this anti-rational, anti-science cult has met with such astonishing success:

One reason these milieus have succumbed so readily to gender cultism is that activists have successfully weaponized a definition of “transphobia” that now encompasses virtually any acknowledgment of the biological facts concerning human sexual dimorphism. Moreover, their case often is made in apocalyptic terms, with whole legions of trans children allegedly being set on extinguishing themselves if even the slightest ideological deviation is permitted in public discourse. Through such rhetorical methods, even this essay can be regarded as dangerous (and perhaps even deadly) propaganda. One of the few liberal journalists who’s taken pains to map out these tactics, Jesse Singal, has been subject to a campaign of lies and personal attacks that resembles Scientologists’ treatment of “Suppressive Persons.”

Indeed, even tautological descriptions of biological reality now are cast as thought crimes. In 2017, world-renowned Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie told an interviewer: “When people talk about, ‘Are trans women women?’ my feeling is trans women are trans women.” This perfectly sensible statement was predictably denounced on that basis that, as Vox put it, “these remarks implied that trans women aren’t ‘real women’—a stereotype that transgender people constantly struggle against and find deeply offensive.” And in a searing June 15th essay, Adichie describes the Kafkaesque ordeal she’s endured in the four years since, during which time literary rivals (especially her former protégé, Akwaeke Emezi) have orchestrated an often sociopathic-seeming campaign of defamation—capped by Emezi’s ghoulish tweet expressing “trust that there are other people who will pick up machetes to protect us from the harm transphobes like Adichie & Rowling seek to perpetuate.”…

Last month, Quillette broadcast a podcast interview with Bernard Lane, a writer and editor at the Australian who has documented the risks associated with rushing gender dysphoric children into aggressive medical treatments. In any other pediatric medical context, this kind of journalistic investigation would be seen as laudatory. But such is the ideological climate surrounding this issue that special rules apparently apply. On May 24th, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation presented viewers with what purported to be a profile of Michelle Telfer, head of the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne’s Gender Clinic, but whose main purpose seems to have been the denunciation of the Australian’s coverage of gender transition.

Telfer complains that the newspaper is “one-sided” and that it has quoted experts of whom Telfer disapproves. At one point in the feature, a public-health official attacks the Australian for having “continued to publish articles” that challenge the preferred narrative—thus echoing Telfer’s own public complaints about her work being criticized. The public broadcaster’s overall message is that the journalistic community should get on board with the received wisdom, and stop creating trouble for those seeking to reflexively “affirm” any child who claims to be born in the wrong body.

As Keira Bell’s stunning legal victory in the UK shows, the journalistic establishment has much to answer for when it comes to either ignoring, or even actively suppressing, well-founded concerns in this area. In Britain, Ms. Bell’s case and related developments have set in motion a much-needed process of soul-searching among policy-makers (with the UK government now severing ties with Stonewall UK’s infamously cynical diversity-training program). But this process is less advanced in other English-speaking countries such as Canada. In the United States, meanwhile, the policy landscape is increasingly polarized between progressives who seek total censorship of “gender-critical” viewpoints, and red-state social conservatives enacting overly broad laws that, in some cases, would go too far by banning transition therapies completely.

Is that characterisation of red-state conservatives going too far really fair? From the Reuters article they link to:

Arkansas on Tuesday became the first U.S. state to ban certain types of treatment to transgender youth, overriding a veto by Governor Asa Hutchinson and inviting lawsuits from civil rights groups that have vowed to stop it.

The law threatens any healthcare professional who provides puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones or gender-affirming surgery to minors with losing their medical license and opens them up to lawsuits from patients who later regret their procedures.

At least 16 other states are considering similar legislation, which transgender advocates have attacked, saying that cutting off badly needed care to adolescents would inevitably lead to more suicides.

That sounds entirely reasonable to me, and in line with the Keira Bell judgement here. Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and gender-affirming surgery to minors? Not good, especially in the current hysterical social media climate, where troubled young girls are encouraged to think that they can become boys and put an end to all their problems by cutting their breasts off. And the same irresponsible claims about suicides unless all their wishes are granted. Perhaps Quillette are too keen here to find something nasty on the right of the political spectrum, so they can claim to be negotiating some sensible middle path. But there is no sensible middle path here, when we're talking about medical mutilation in the name of gender ideology.

Still, they end well:

While each of the controversies discussed herein may seem small and inconsequential—the contents of a museum gift store, a deleted Twitter account, a canceled university event, a muzzled author—the larger issue at play is not. The “final, most essential command” of any coercive movement is, as George Orwell once put it, “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” Once you sweep aside all the glitter showers, animated unicorns, and rainbow emojis, that is ultimately what gender supremacism is truly about.

Indeed. This is real 2 + 2 = 5 stuff.