Mick Hartley

The main reason for the dropping of sex-based categories in the Brit awards seems to have been that self-declared "non-binary" artists like Sam Smith don't like to be classified as either male or female, so would feel excluded. Oh dear. As a result, it was women who were excluded from an all-male list. 

Brendan O'Neill:

What’s more important – women’s rights or Sam Smith’s feelings? We’ve had a loud and clear answer to that maddest of questions over the past few days. It’s Sam Smith’s feelings. Of course it is. The right of this ear-piercing nonbinary balladeer not to suffer the indignity of winning an award with the word ‘male’ on it – despite his obviously being a bloke – takes precedence over the right of female pop artists to have their own sexed awards category and to pick up gongs for their work. Smith’s eccentric identity trumps your right to win prizes, ladies. Suck it up….

There are some important points to make here. First, Sam Smith was not ‘excluded’ from the Brits. That’s just nonsense. It is demeaning to those who have suffered real oppression to describe a bloke’s infantile, hammy refusal to accept a gong with the word ‘male’ on it as oppression. A man saying ‘Ooh, I can’t accept that award because its wording will offend my outlandish identity as a “they”’ is about as far from Rosa Parks as you can get. Smith excluded himself from the Brits by being in denial about his maleness… Why should awards change to accommodate the faddish beliefs of a nonbinary clique?

That’s the other point – the staggering narcissism of the nonbinary ideology. These people really do believe that the entire world should mould itself around their ideology. Male and female awards must be scrapped. Female toilets, changing rooms and other private spaces must be thrown open to men who feel like women. Even language itself must be twisted and bent to these people’s identity feels. So we’re all expected to use ‘preferred pronouns’ and even to mangle grammar by using ‘they’ to refer to one person. My use of the he pronoun for Smith and the she pronoun for Corrin and D’Arcy will be judged by some a heinous act of bigotry. But I am not willing to sacrifice the sense and universalism of the language I use to appease the fever dreams of a minority movement.

‘For the narcissist, the world is a mirror’, said Christopher Lasch. The narcissist must always see ‘his “grandiose self” reflected in the attentions of others’, he said. So it is with the trans movement. It expects every realm of society – every awards ceremony, every woman’s space, every linguistic tradition – to bow and scrape before its post-truth, ahistorical belief that people are whatever sex they say they are. The truly oppressive force was not the Brits having male and female categories but the pressure put on the Brits to scrap those categories in order to flatter the narcissistic delusions of a few nonbinaries. This is the opposite of a civil-rights movement. Progressive movements in the past were concerned with changing the world to make it better for all. The regressive, navel-gazing cult of gender play is obsessed with altering the world so that its own adherents never have to encounter an idea or a space that dents their fragile egos. The irony of their misuse of the word ‘they’ is that they are myopically focused on me, me, me.