Mick Hartley

Lionel Shriver, in the Times, on the extraordinary power of the trans lobby to bully critics into silence:

When conceiving Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, Helen Joyce anticipated a rough ride. Sure enough, an initially interested literary agent who considered her proposal “well-argued”, “persuasive” and “timely” eventually demurred that Joyce would need an advocate to “weather the storm that publishing this book will create. I am sorry to say that I am not that person.”

One sceptical British editor wrote, “Debate over trans issues is incredibly polarised and siloed, and if we are going to torch our own credentials as woke members in good standing we would prefer to do it for a book that has some chance of selling.”

A rep made of sterner stuff finally sold the hot potato to the small independent Oneworld in Britain. Yet to date no American publisher among the dozen approached (one editor dubbed the manuscript “radioactive”) will touch the incendiary tuber with a barge pole. Pre-publication, online detractors smeared Joyce as an antisemitic neo-Nazi. While the likes of Jenni Murray and Richard Dawkins furnished enthusiastic blurbs, other established writers, fearing stink by association, held back from endorsing a book they admired.

Reviews have been glowing. A first for Oneworld, Trans hit the Sunday Times bestseller list. It reached Amazon’s top ten. But don’t imagine that high-street booksellers nationwide are clamouring for more copies. Unlike Ryan Anderson’s similarly “radioactive” When Harry Became Sally, Joyce’s terrifying book is still available on Amazon. But would-be book buyers object on Twitter that their local Waterstones shops are suppressing sales. The shops stock one or two copies at most — often shelved in bizarre locations like media studies or stashed under the counter. Customers are obliged to special-order or told that the print run was puny (a lie; warehouses have never run short of a book already in its third printing).

Mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC have spurned interviews. Intelligence Squared, which prides itself on addressing contemporary controversies, pulled its podcast invitation on the day of recording. An award-winning war journalist, its CEO has covered terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan but couldn’t, he explained, face down his own staff.

What grotesque authorial assertions might warrant this recoil? That humans are either male or female. (Even the rare birth defect of the “intersex” comingles recognisably male and female anatomy.) That sex is not “assigned” but observable at birth. That we might think twice about allowing people born male who still have their kit into women’s prisons, rape counselling centres, domestic violence shelters, women’s changing rooms and women’s sports. Joyce has no beef with trans people, only with the movement’s radical ideology. However urgent, her tone is temperate.

Shriver identifies the success of earlier civil rights movements as the driving force here:

Successive civil rights movements culminated in the widespread legalisation of gay marriage. Overnight, being gay became passé. Homosexuality was boringly OK and the battle was won. But crusaders rarely retire. Energising activism provides an identity, a sense of purpose and often a livelihood. Seizing on what seemed the last remaining civil rights fight, advocates have pursued the trans cause with an unparalleled vengeance.

More broadly, progressivism is suffering from its own success. The left’s shibboleths about women’s equality, environmentalism, workplace health and safety, sexual harassment, disability access and racial discrimination have gone mainstream. Hence the left’s accelerating extremism. To maintain directional distinction, as the centre moves left, the left moves lefter.

She doesn't mention Stonewall UK, but they provide the obvious case study here: an organisation that achieved its aims of gay rights, but, instead of quietly disbanding, found itself another cause to champion. This new cause of trans rights may look progressive and sound progressive, but in reality it's both homophobic and misogynist – completely the opposite of Stonewall's original philosophy. No matter: it's proved quite the nice little earner.

Having documented the descent into ideological cannibalism in improbable niches like online knitting circles, Gavin Haynes coined the useful expression “purity spiral”, whereby the test of political sanctity amid a once-likeminded group grows ever stricter, until the very originators of a school of thought are eaten by their own. The French Revolution, the Salem witch trials and Mao’s cultural revolution all got sucked into purity spirals. Our so-called elite are caught up in the same take-no-prisoners, circling-the-drain self-destruction.

Having your mind right on transgenderism is now the ultimate purity test. A loyal wokester is thus never to mention the unknown long-term medical consequences of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, the growing number of “detransitioners” who regret irreversible surgical disfigurement, transition’s threat of sexual dysfunction and infertility, or the moral dubiety of ushering children “affirmatively” on to a path whose lifelong implications minors are too young to grasp. Even to broach these subjects is to mark yourself as a pariah and be cast from the faithful.

Virtually everyone wants transgender people treated with respect and granted their civil rights. But for activists, that’s not the goal. It’s no coincidence that the subtitles of three recent books on this lightning-rod subject — Gerard Casey’s Hidden Agender: Transgenderism’s Struggle Against Reality, Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, and Joyce’s Trans — all use the same word: reality.

What makes this purity test a bridge too far is the demand that we deny what we know and see. The charity ActionAid UK asserts bewilderingly that there is “no such thing as a biologically female/male body”. In claiming that maleness and femaleness are all in our heads trans activists aim to erase the existence of human biological sex from life, language and law, thereby justifying putting sex offenders with functional penises on women’s NHS hospital wards. But a psychic break from reality is the textbook definition of insanity. Let’s not go there.